Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Google Generates $1 Billion On Five Enterprise Products: Can You Name Them? (GOOG)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-generates-1-billion-on-five-enterprise-products-can-you-name-them-2012-6

Larry Page

Google books more than 96% of its revenue from ads.

The remaining ~ 4% comes pretty much from its enterprise products. Even though it's a piddly percentage of revenue, in actual dollars, enterprise amounts to a $1.37 billion business for the search giant. 

And it's growing fast, at rate of about 30% a year.

Some 1,200 Google employees work on these various enterprise products, too. That's about 3.6% of Google's total headcount.

Google also has a network of 2,500 certified partners, including big traditional IT consultants like Accenture and Cognizant, as well as smaller partners to serve small and mid-size businesses.

In those terms, Google's enterprise business is actually the size of a fairly large company.

While Google doesn't break out the revenues of each of these business lines individually, we've come up with a few interesting tidbits on each one.

Can you name Google's five enterprise businesses?

No. 1: Google Apps (including Gmail and Google Drive)

Google Apps is Google's online productivity apps. They compete against Microsoft Office and Exchange, IBM Lotus, and various startups like Zoho (productivity) and YouSendIt (collaboration and storage).

Google claims to have over 4 million customers for Apps.

No. 2: Google Search Appliance

Google Search Appliance was launched in 2002. It competes against high-priced enterprise search and information retrieval technology from Autonomy (HP) and others.

Likewise Google also offers search to enterprises as a cloud service, known as Google Enterprise Search. This is a Google search engine box that companies place on their web sites that will search just the company's own site, not the whole Web.

No 3: Google Cloud Services

Google Cloud Services is Google's version of Amazon Web Services. It competes with Microsoft Azure,  Rackspace and a growing list of others.

Companies can upload their applications to Google App Engine provided those apps were written in a language that Google Apps supports. Google then sends a monthly bill based on how much that app was used.

Google also offers Google Cloud Storage, that competes with Amazon S3 and Google Prediction API. Last month it added a new big-data analysis service based called BigQuery, which competes against various Hadoop startups, recent hot IPO Splunk, and big players like IBM and HP.

No. 4: Geospatial and mapping products

Geospatial and mapping products are based on Google Maps technology and known as Google Earth and Google Maps. The paid-for business versions compete with specialty GIS providers like Esri.

By the way, this set of services no longer includes Google Sketchup. Google sold the super popular 3D modeling app to Trimble in April.

No. 5: Chromebooks for businesses

Chromebooks, and the Chrome OS compete against the Microsoft Windows ecosystem, including big PC vendors like Dell and HP, and Apple.

Google isn't discussing sales figures yet. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Chromebook hasn't exactly killed the PC yet.

Still, Google continues to invest in Chrome OS and these kind of thin client devices. In fact it just released a new Chrome product called Chromebox. This is Google's first ever kinda-sorta desktop PC. Chromebox is a thin client, meaning you plug in your own monitor and keyboard and use it to access applications stored elsewhere, like Google Apps.

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