Google has recently unveiled a suite of new services called Google Apps for your Domain. Google Apps allows a web domain owner to provide email, IM, calendar services as well as build websites and start pages. The beta service is free and is hosted on Google’s hardware and software. 

As the first market, Google chose to targeted educational institutions with their large and computer savvy Net Gen user groups. Arizona State University was one of the first to sign up. Students kept their “asu.edu” e-mail addresses, received 2G of space and are able to tag and search their email as well as organize and share events in their calendars. It has allowed the university to shift their IT resources to other projects.  Other universities and small businesses have signed up to the service since. 

Google Apps looks like a disruptive strategy to enter the enterprise computing market. Google can test and refine the product on a less demanding yet sophisticated user group (such as students) allowing the company to later expand into mainstream corporate computing. Although, software as a service is far from a new concept, Google’s experiments should have the types of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP worried.