Google's next opportunity is enterprise: Schmidt

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 22 October 2009, 21:34 IST   |    7 Comments
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Google's next opportunity is enterprise: Schmidt
Orlando: Till now, Google generates most of its revenue from the consumers, but Chief of Google, Eric Schmidt, believes that business customers are the company's next big opportunity for growth after selling ads. "Enterprise is a huge priority for the management team and me personally. It's the next big billion-dollar opportunity after our display (ad) business," said Schmidt. Google might not be at the core of every company's operations, but Schmidt has some roots in the information technology community that assembles in force at Gartner Symposium. Before Google, he was Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Sun Microsystems and CEO of Novell. Google has a variety of business-oriented products and services - Postini for security, Checkout for online shopping and a search appliance for in-house search. But the highest profile effort is Google Apps, which in its premium incarnation delivers Gmail and an online office application suite for $50 per user per year. Schmidt argues that there's not so much difference between enterprise and consumer markets as there once was, and the gap is narrowing. Gmail is one example. "Gmail's growth is accelerating from its current position of users as we seem to be gaining share from everybody else. That's a good example of the consumer and enterprise growing together," said Schmidt. When it comes to pricing, Google wants to fund its own work but not charge much. The biggest constraint from customers is feature availability, not price. "Most of the sales activity is a discussion about strategy. Our prices are so much lower than everybody else's that there will never be a price discussion," said Schmidt. The company considered giving its enterprise applications away for free but rejected the idea. "We looked at ad-supported enterprise applications and decided most corporations would not be comfortable with random ads showing up on somebody's desktop," said Schmidt.