SaaS Blogs

The SaaS world is abuzz around Google yet again with yesterday’s news that Google will acquire on-demand communications security firm Postini Solutions for $625 million.  The acquisition is aimed at bolstering enterprise security and management confidence in the Google Apps online suite, and seems to be a direct mirror of Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Services strategy which was born from their own 2005 acquisition of Frontbridge Technologies. 

With advanced security, archiving, and message filtering in place, Google’s hopes are that this move will shine a new light on the Google Apps suite as a viable hosted business suite to enterprise users who often must conform to compliancy requirements in security and data archiving.  It’s a good move, and one that Google pretty much had to make in some form or another.  They’ve established over 100,000 Google Apps users who will speak for the suite’s usability and aid in productivity.  Now they’ve set their sights on converting the hordes of users who haven’t been convinced that usability benefits and frills outweigh security and compliancy concerns.

As always, Phil has an interesting piece that takes the news and goes another step… “What next for MessageLabs?”