Google Builds on Its Plan to Attract More Enterprise Users

The team at Google are continuing to ramp up their efforts to bring more enterprise customers into the G-Suite and Google Cloud Platform this year. Ever since Cloud Next 2019 took place in April this year, the company has been investing more time and effort into developing attractive corporate features for the G-Suite productivity environment. 

For instance, as part of the Cloud Next Event in Tokyo that happened in July this year, Alphabet Inc, Google's parent company, introduced a new AI-enabled security tool for Google Drive. This new solution flags suspicious activity in the Google Drive, providing chief information officers with useful ways to track and defend their data networks. In March this year, Google also deployed a new machine learning service that identifies the key documents in a user's drive an automates the process of grouping files together via a single dashboard. 

Although some of the corporate tools now available for enterprises in G-Suite are only available for higher-tier Google packages, they all represent an ongoing commitment to make Google more enterprise-friendly. One recent report found that 5 million businesses are now paying to use G-Suite, compared to only 4 million in 2018. What's more, Google executives believe that the cloud business is on track to achieve an $8 billion annual revenue this year. 

Recreating G-Suite for the Enterprise

Google has always been a front-runner when it comes to things like artificial intelligence, cloud storage, and data analytics. However, the company has struggled to compete against other productivity suite providers in the past, like Microsoft Office, for example. The decision to recreate the G-Suite for the new enterprise environment is an important step forward for Google, and something they've been planning for quite some time. 

In 2018, Google redesigned Gmail to make it more effective for the collaborative workplace, integrating things like calendar entries for conferences and security enhancements too. These efforts, and those taking place this year, are successfully making G-Suite a more appealing option for the enterprise space. According to the Colgate-Palmolive company, the new tools are now allowing employees to share information more effectively in real-time, improve productivity, and enhance efficiency in the modern workforce. 

In a testament to Google's success in the Enterprise environment, Okta Inc, an identity-management service, said that the number of G-Suite users in its network had grown by 49% between 2017 and 2018, compared to only a 40% growth for Microsoft Office. 

It's becoming increasingly obvious that Google doesn't want to be seen as a solution just for smaller companies, freelancers, and developers anymore. The leader in search, cloud and artificial intelligence wants to prove itself as a solution for mid-sized and larger enterprise groups. That means overcoming a somewhat sticky image as the tool that teenagers have been using to share files and save schoolwork that has hounded Google for a number of years. 

Can Google Compete in the Enterprise?

Although it has taken a while for Google to make a real effort with its image as an enterprise tool provider, the company does have the power to compete in the enterprise space. The applications on the G-Suite are popular, intuitive and easy-to-use. What's more, they're growing more appealing all the time, with new features in security, privacy and ease-of-use appearing at a rapid pace. 

Additionally, Google offers users the benefit of being able to access a variety of tools via a web browsers, rather than asking people to download separate apps. Companies investing in Google can make their productivity suite Cloud-based from day one. 

All Google really needs to do to keep moving in the right direction with it's enterprise approach to the G-Suite, is ensure that it's listening to the needs of today's modern companies. If G-Suite pays attention to the tools that companies are asking for, like it seems to be doing with the introduction of new protection features for Gmail and new sharing options for Google Sheets, then its growth is sure to continue. Google is quickly becoming a secure, reliable and forward-thinking provider of productivity suite tools for the enterprise, in an age where the workplace is changing more rapidly than ever.