Interview: Google completes integration of Postini into Google Apps Premier Edition

Google Apps is an organization-targeted package of several of Google's applications such as Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, and e-mail (GMail) that Google markets as a different offering from the stand alone versions of the Web-based applications. Whereas the base version of Google Apps is free, the Premier Edition (largely targeted at enteprises) costs $50 per user per year. In addition to the free phone support that the $50 gets you, the company announced today that it is (a) offering the Postini functionality at no additional cost and (2) upping the e-mail storage limit for Premier Edition customers from 10GB to 25GB.

To get more of the details on the integration news, I interviewed the director of product management for Google Enterprise Matt Glotzbach. To listen to the interview, press the play button on the Flash-based podcast player above, or, if you want, there's a download option to grab the MP3. If you're subscribed to ZDNet's IT Matters series of podasts (see how), it should show up on your system, MP3 player, or both automatically. In the interview, Glotzbach and I riff on some of the standards that would be good to have in order to eliminate spam. He talks a bit about the granular level of spam-control that Postini brings to the Google Apps portfolio. For example, e-mail senders can be whitelisted for an entire organization, by group, or just for a particular recipient (and, based on central policy, recipients may have the ability to make their own configurations).

Although he wasn't prepared to make any official announcements about API consolidation and portfolio changes, Glotzbach indicated that, like many of the Google Apps services, Postini has several APIs that it makes available to third party developers and that somewhere down the line, they'll be looking at ways to reconcile the Postini API infrastructure with Google's API infrastructure.