While Salesforce.com was unveiling the first iteration of its new generation of on-demand vertical market software services aimed at the financial services sector this past week, Google was flexing its muscles as a viable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor with its first round of fee-based, packaged online desktop solutions aimed at enterprise customers.

Google’s new Google Apps includes integrated word processing and spreadsheet applications, as well as BlackBerry support for Gmail for $50/user, a fraction of the price of Microsoft’s Office suite. In order to overcome corporate apprehension about the quality of its new services, Google is offering guaranteed uptime, IT management tools, technical support, and increased e-mail storage. Yet, to show how far Google must go to fulfill its promise as a viable provider of on-demand enterprise apps, Google Gmail users suffered from a series of service failures during the first week … Read More »