Google has announced that within the next 6 to 12 months they will be adding improved video chat features within Google Apps.
While Google didn’t reveal too many details, what is known is they will be offering multi-person video chats as part of the lineup. Currently, you can only have one-on-one video chats. All of the new features will also be integrated seamlessly within Gmail and the other apps, instead of as a new application.
Google seems to be targeting business users specifically, where 2 million organizations account for 20 million Google Apps users.
And with numbers like those, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google had plans to eventually roll out a complete video-conferencing solution in Google Apps…even offering a free service comparable to those offered by sites such as GoTo Meeting. After all, in 2007 they aquired video conferencing software from the Swedish company Marratech.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out though…as well as how their new offerings will affect businesses already in the marketplace.
More robust video conferencing in Google Apps would be nice. I am more excited about Google Wave though. It looks like a home run to me (http://wave.google.com/).
Keep up the good work, Dave. I love reading your blog!
The enterprise market is getting more crowded and competitive, with new players challenging established names like Microsoft or IBM. Cisco just launched a wide set of new collaboration tools aimed at enterprises and Google has been pushing hard in this sector for the past few years. Now, Google says it plans to expand the capabilities of the Apps suite with several video features, which add to the current functionality built into Gmail.
Google added voice and video-chat features to Gmail Chat, the web implementation of the company’s instant-messaging service, Gtalk, in 2008 and the features have since made their way to other Google services. For now, though, the tools only have one-on-one capabilities, great for everyday users, but are not much employed in an enterprise environment. The company now wants to broaden the capabilities of the voice and video-chat features to allow more participants but also bring them up to spec for business use from a stability point of view.
“This [current Gmail capability] is the first step in a much broader set of features we hope to roll out over the next six to 12 months around video [and voice] chat capabilities,” Rishi Chandra, Google Apps product manager, told the SFGate. “It’s a great opportunity for us to push that space along.”
There won’t be a dedicated video-collaboration tool, instead, the current features will be upgraded and the video chat will be integrated with the other products bringing another layer of communication rather than a separate product. The central hub for the feature will still be Gmail, though.
Google hasn’t provided any more details on the video features and it’s also unclear if it will use any of the technology acquired when it bought Swedish video-conferencing company Marratech. Finally, Google has said it has no plans at the moment to launch any social-networking features like many of its competitors are doing now. The company says it plans to wait to see how this develops and how it should approach this before deciding to go down that route.