Warning - Google aims to dominate unified comms and collab market

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 19 August 2010 12:12

IT Industry - Strategy

Frost & Sullivan has warned that Google is after the unified communications and collaboration market. This should come as no surprise.

Noting that "Google'¦has been known to employ aggressive acquisitive strategies towards the domination of new markets," F&S points to "A recent surge of takeovers such as 2Web Technologies, Marratech, GrandCentral, Gzimo5, and other innovative communications and collaboration firms, as well as recently developed and launched products," as showing that "the UCC market is one of the Google's directions."

And F&S predicts that: "Despite being a new entrant, Google, with its proactive approach, abundant capital and human resources, will very likely become a major UCC participant in the coming years."

The stakes are huge, and Google will be up against some of the giants of the industry, especially Cisco and Microsoft. In late 2008 Cisco, then a major player in the UC market, made much of the fact that it was expanding its focus to include collaboration. It estimated this adding a market worth a potential $US7b per year in addition to the $27b UC market.

Dorota Oviedo, industry analyst for F&S's Unified Communications & Collaboration group, says that Google has not officially announced this strategy, but: "It is evident that, by continually adding new UCC applications to its portfolio and focusing on integrating them, the company is effectively entering the UCC market."

While it may not have specifically identified UCC as a target market, Google has certainly indicated a business strategy that would embrace UCC and much more.

At its recent Google I/O developers' event in the US, Google set out its vision of all applications running in the cloud and being accessed via 'smart' browsers. It went further than this to talk of its vision of 'continuity of experience'. According to Google, "What that means is that everywhere you go your data will be accessible, because it is on the web."

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