14 DAY TRIAL // The enterprise market is getting more crowded and competitive, with new players challenging established names like Microsoft or IBM. Cisco just launched a wide set of new collaboration tools aimed at enterprises and Google has been pushing hard in this sector for the past few years. Now, Google says it plans to expand the capabilities of the Apps suite with several video features, which add to the current functionality built into Gmail.
Google added voice and video-chat features to Gmail Chat, the web implementation of the company's instant-messaging service, Gtalk, in 2008 and the features have since made their way to other Google services. For now, though, the tools only have one-on-one capabilities, great for everyday users, but are not much employed in an enterprise environment. The company now wants to broaden the capabilities of the voice and video-chat features to allow more participants but also bring them up to spec for business use from a stability point of view.
"This [current Gmail capability] is the first step in a much broader set of features we hope to roll out over the next six to 12 months around video [and voice] chat capabilities," Rishi Chandra, Google Apps product manager, told the SFGate. "It's a great opportunity for us to push that space along."
There won't be a dedicated video-collaboration tool, instead, the current features will be upgraded and the video chat will be integrated with the other products bringing another layer of communication rather than a separate product. The central hub for the feature will still be Gmail, though.
Google hasn't provided any more details on the video features and it's also unclear if it will use any of the technology acquired when it bought Swedish video-conferencing company Marratech. Finally, Google has said it has no plans at the moment to launch any social-networking features like many of its competitors are doing now. The company says it plans to wait to see how this develops and how it should approach this before deciding to go down that route.