Millions of people love their Android phones, but corporate IT teams have a rockier relationship with Google's mobile operating system and its comparatively lax app store. While many consumers don't fret about the risk of malware, some companies feel that they cannot take the risk. An establishment's archives are incredibly sensitive and vulnerable to outside attacks from hackers.
“I think the security issue is a significant one," says Scott Strawn, research director at IDC. "Google really just last year started making a meaningful push into the enterprise. [Google] had really, prior to that, been primarily, and still are, consumer oriented.”
To make a bigger impact in the corporate world, Google must make its security bulletproof, which is why it has invested in a number of online security companies, including the start-up Synack, which was founded by two former government officials who have ties to the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency.
But Google has many plans for working its way into office places, including tools for employers and employees.
Hiring
For job seekers, Google wants to be an intricate part of the hiring process. The tech giant appears to be a big of a fan of Glassdoor, the online service that lets employees anonymously review their current and former employers. Google Capital contributed to a $70 million joint investment in the Yelp-like business review site.
For employers, Google has made three big investments in regard to hiring: 1) Smarterer, which wants to make resumes obsolete with skill tests to determine if potential employees are right for the job, 2) MindSumo, a place for large businesses to pose their corporate challenges to college students, who can receive prizes or gain exposure for future employment, and 3) Checkr, a start-up that runs background checks for organizations.
Day-to-day tasks
Once Google assists in bringing in employees, it wants to be essential to the day-to-day functions of an office, and it starts by turning Google Drive into the next Microsoft Office.
“I think when you’re unseating Microsoft, in this case, who had as recently as a couple years ago something on the order of a 97-percent market share, it’s a big challenge. I think the way they’ve gone about approaching this market is very clever,” says Mr. Strawn. “There’s an incumbent player in the market that has a virtual monopoly that they’re working to unseat, and the way they are going about it is kind of in the way a start-up would go about it. [By addressing] relatively small companies first, and as they improve the products, they market it to larger and larger companies.”
The Drive apps – online tools for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations – are becoming essential tools for businesses, thanks to purchases such as DocVerse, an online plug-in for Microsoft Office, which provided a foundation to build off for Google Drive. Google is also using its work apps to digitize things that can be a pain in the modern tech world. This includes physical signatures (DocuSign and HelloSign) and paper faxes (HelloFax, creator of HelloSign, which Google did not invest in but has a partnership with).
The company is re-imagining e-mail by helping Slack, reMail, Sparrow, and others improve Google Hangouts and Gchat; looking to bring conference calls into modern times with Highfive (from the guys behind DocVerse) and UberConference; assisting in micromanaging the settings for business calls with MobileDay; and even aiding in scheduling board meetings with EventBoard.
And just as Google sees paper faxes and signatures as obsolete, it also sees old forms of business productivity and efficiency management as holding back the industry. With BackOps – a start-up that digitizes and outsources human resources, accounting, and book keeping – Google sees a future without low-level office assistants, as well as automated payroll duties through ZenPayroll.
And if all else fails, Google still owns around 40 percent of the US advertising market, so it will be collecting business dollars one way or another.
