InsideGoogle

Google Pays $625 Million For Postini

Google has announced the acquisition of Postini, an enterprise security company, for the large sum of $625 million. Google hopes to use Postini to boost Google Apps, by bringing it more in line with the security and legal compliance issues corporations are concerned with. While no doubt Google needed to assuage the doubts of potential corporate users by beefing up Google Apps in those areas, I had no idea it would cost that much.

The Google blog says:

Larger enterprises, however, face a challenge: though they want to deliver simple, useful hosted applications to their employees, they’re also required to support complex business rules, information security mandates, and an array of legal and corporate compliance issues. In effect, many businesses use legacy systems not because they are the best for their users, but because they are able to support complex business rules. This isn’t a tradeoff that any business should have to make.

By the way, what’s with the title on the Google blog? “Welcome, Postini team”. No one could come up with something wittier? Previous Google acquisitions have merited punnier post titles, like “All aboard” for GrandCentral, “Adding more flare” for FeedBurner, and “A picture’s worth a thousand clicks” for Panoramio. Nobody could come up with a single decent joke? I’m shocked!

Hmm… How about “The Postini always rings twice”?

July 9th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Apps, Products, General | one comment