Though Google hasn't outlined how it will assimilate Postini, the first integration likely will be with the business version of Gmail. Postini started as an anti-spam vendor, and most of its customers, Google included, route their e-mail through its servers. Hosting e-mail servers is a step, but Google's enterprise ambitions go beyond e-mail. So do compliance mandates. Google wants a share of Microsoft's Office suite market, and Postini's technology can be applied in that pursuit.
Compliance is a popular buzzword in IT, used to sell everything from servers to switches. To vendors of hosted applications, it usually has the opposite effect: IT managers would rather keep data safely behind the corporate firewall. Google's $625 million acquisition of messaging security company Postini, announced last week, may change that. Rather than be a barrier, compliance could emerge as a driver of software as a service.
