Google: A fast follower in the enterprise?

Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's Enterprise Group, gave a keynote at Interop New York 2005 this week. We captured some of his keynote remarks on video.  He outlines the problems of finding documents within corporate networks, and says that it's "intrinsically strange,"  and pitches the unified search experience between the Internet and corporate networks with a Google search box.

He finally said something interesting in talking about how Google can bring the learning, including lots of user feedback, from consumer products, technologies and interfaces into enterprise initiatives. He cited real-time communication as potential crossover area. "Whether there's a real-time communication problem that Google Talk can solve is something we have to figure it out over time," Girouard said. He called Google "somewhat of fast follower" in the enterprise space [video], and said that Google wants "extend the fast, fast learning from the consumer world into the enterprise at the right time."  

So far, Google hasn't fast followed on much of anything enterprise except its search appliance, but over time producing enterprise-class services and applications might be an attractive business as the company seeks to leverage its technology, including how it runs its internal IT, and product development.