14 DAY TRIAL // Google is one of the largest web companies around yet it makes most of its revenue, about 97 percent, from advertising. There's still potential growth in advertising, especially as the market is picking up, but Google is looking for new revenue streams and is making quite an effort going for the enterprise software and services market. Its Google Apps suite has seen some success with businesses and the company ran an extensive marketing campaign in August promoting it in the US. Now it's expanding the campaign worldwide but it's also making some small but important changes to the tone and, consequently, some of the facts.
Google's Apps suite offers some collaboration features that some of the traditional office suites can't really match but on the whole it can't match their features and functionality yet. Still, the company is putting a lot of weight behind it and has even turned to traditional forms of advertising like a series of billboards in several major cities in the US this summer. The campaign titled “Going Google” highlighted some of the reasons to make the switch. At the time it claimed 1.75 million were using Google Apps at the start of the summer.
Now it's claiming 2 million customers and 20 million users worldwide, not exactly shocking for four months' work though the company's definition of “Going Google” may have changed in the meantime. In the international campaign, which will be rolled out in London in the UK, Paris, France, Sydney, Australia, Tokyo, Japan and Singapore, going Google means using Google Apps but also Postini, Google's email security and management suite, or the Google Search Appliance. This may not seem like a big deal but the looser definition gives the company much more freedom in choosing the companies that have “Gone Google.”
For example, Google now claims that 60 percent of the Fortune 100 companies are using Google products and also 60 percent of the world's top brands, which isn't to say they are now using Google Apps but just one of the company’s enterprise products in one form or another. Even the ones using Google Apps may not do it exclusively, or even for most of their employees. Still, it has managed to get some pretty big customers like Motorola's mobile phone division with about 20,000 users, Konica Minolta with 7,000 and some even larger ones. The ad campaign has also expanded in the US both online but also running ads in some major newspapers and a new site for it has also been launched.