“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” — Albert Einstein

Google’s three should-be M&A considerations

Sunday, February 5, 2006 | 2 comments

I wrote, earlier, Microsoft’s two should-be M&A considerations.

Eric Schonfeld writes Google Enterprise and makes the case that Google should get into Enterprise Applications.

If Google’s earnings miss tells us anything it is that it needs to find some serious new lines of revenue. For all of its cool products that it seems to launch every week, none of them outside of search ads are making much, if any, money. Here’s my latest column on why Google should become a platform for online enterprise software apps and take on SAP (which is about to launch its own online CRM service) and Salesforce.com.

Absolutely! In fact, Enterprise and SME are the places to go, and in both, Google has great customers already.

Here’s Google’s three should-be M&A considerations, all in Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) :

Salesforce.com : Hosted CRM, with a meagre $4.14B market cap.

Webex: Hosted web collaboration and conferencing, with a paltry $1.26B market cap.

Qualys: Hosted Security, still private, for sure less than a Billion.

That $20 Billion or so in lost market value that Google just suffered, would come rushing back, if they spend this miniscule ~$6-$8 Billion, and make a statement to the market that they understand the need to look beyond advertising, and SaaS is a perfect place to loiter into, next.

Comments

yep, these may be one course for google. but
seamana, i still feel Google make more sense
with going on Microsoft’s stronghold and should
venture into hightly profitable OS product line.
that would surely make and get lots of money
in recent market lost.

nano Sunday, February 5, 2006 at 1:48 AM PT

But there is obvious and quick way to get get into that race. the company that should go after Microsoft on the OS front is Apple, not Google.

Sramana Mitra Sunday, February 5, 2006 at 1:22 PM PT

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