Google Apps grow a brain

Google Apps, the unbelievably successful cloud-based alternative to on-premises messaging and collaboration tools, such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook, have suddenly gotten smarter. Now, business users can work with a new Google Gadget from PivotLink to squeeze some business intelligence from the data in those online documents.

The PivotLink Gadget lets Google Apps users create customized dashboards to view and collaborate on business data. For example, users can pour in, say, sales data from a Google Docs spreadsheet, combine it with weather data from regions where stores are located and annotate it with e-mails to determine how storms affected a particular sales promotion.

Nan Fosland, director of product strategy at PivotLink, says the Gadget is available now for free. Once users start getting hooked on what BI tools can do for them, she says, "they will will want to become our client."

Google has more than one million businesses, totallying more than 10 million individuals users of its online applications. The business is growing at about 3,000 users per business day. Lest these numbers wow you too much, consider that the Radicati Group's latest estimate for Outlook users will top 241 million mailboxes this year and grow to more than 347 million by 2013.

As I noted yesterday, there are numerous larger organizations running Google Apps pilot programs. Some will fail to meet the business's needs. However, some will succeed. And, as Google gets more enterprise-class tools like PivotLink's, it will attract even more businesses at a faster rate, especially as cost pressures mount, and the premium a company pays for Exchange or Domino servers and support becomes less and less defensible.