Google to Acquire Postini

This week Google announced the latest of their acquisitions. They are purchasing Postini for $625 million in cash. In Bits, The New York Times Technology Blog, Saul Hensell writes:

“This move marks Google’s entry into what is an entirely new line of business: offering services to businesses through its enormous network of data centers.”
from Google Goes Corporate

From my point of view, however, the Postini acquisition is entirely in line with Google’s hosted applications strategy. They have been expanding their hosted product offerings for quite some time–Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs, Spreadsheets, Urchin (web analytics), Feedburner… The purchase of Postini is not a ground-breaking move for them.

However, like the Doubleclick acquisition, the Postini acquisition is very significant and pervasive. Google has purchased access to thousands of business customers who depend on Postini-hosted spam filtering and electronic communications security products.

Ultimately, the biggest coup will be in the revenue, more specifically, in the advertising revenue. The AdWords spider already has access to millions of web pages, email messages (Gmail) and other Google-hosted data. It’s my belief that Google will offer Postini for free, or at least offer a large part of it for free, supported by AdWords advertising. Advertising which will be targeted by the AdWords spider. The breadth of new information now available to Google is massive since Postini is one of the larger and most reputable email security (anti-spam) hosted applications available on the web. According to the Postini Company Overview:

“More than 35,000 businesses worldwide depend on Postini. We process over 1 billion messages per day, giving us an incredible pool of intelligence on what is happening on the Internet, who the “bad guys” are, and what they are doing, today. This enables us to stay ahead of their tactics and to proactively protect our customers from even the most advanced attacks.”

Google has acquired another massive influx of information. It will be interesting to see what they ultimately do with this latest investment. Although I’m certain they will rebrand, refine and integrate the product into the Google family and monetize it, I can’t help but wonder out loud what the implications will be and if we will see new anti-trust measures taken against Google.

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