Google gets deeper into Enterprise

Found on InformationWeek

IBM has reached a deal with Google Inc. to bring the consumer Internet into the office by piping YouTube and thousands of other Web programs into IBM software used by millions of office workers.

The pact brings together Google, one of the world’s most popular consumer Web technology companies, and IBM, the biggest supplier of employee portal software which big businesses use to offer a kind of personalized home page for office workers.

This is a major move in bringing consumer generated content into enterprise which will subsequently increase the use of the host of online services and collaborative web 2.0 tools available on the web nowadays to increase innovation and competitiveness.

On another announcement I’ve also seen, Etelos has created a CRM for Google which is “a way to integrate the functionality of a full-scale customer relationship management system with the user interface and integrations of Google’s personalized home page”. They will be releasing the product in three versions: Personal (single user – free), Professional ($25 per user – incl. multi users system, shared contacts, tasks, etc) and Enterprise ($50 per user – incl. access to source, partner hosting or host it yourself on licence).

I haven’t tried it out yet as it’s still in closed beta, but it looks promising from the demo on their site. This should fit in nicely with the newly release Google Apps Premier Edition for enterprise.

Either way it looks like Google’s pushing to get into Businesses no matter small, medium, large or extra large, either by direct negotiations, like with IBM, or by making their web applications and services soo damn easy and too damn useful to intergrate, that others do it for them.