Google Hangouts go corporate with integration into business apps
If you're not quite sure how serious Google is about wooing business users, here's another indication that it is: the company is working with enterprise-y software companies to put the Google Hangout button on their websites or applications.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google is working directly with enterprise software companies to put a Hangout button on their websites and applications — a confirmed partnership push announced via its own Google Enterprise blog and picked up the same day by ZDNet, VentureBeat, BetaNews, and CITEworld. The signal Gigaom flags is intent: after years of Hangouts living as a consumer-facing feature, Google is now courting the buyer who sits inside line-of-business applications.
The significance is distribution, not features. Rather than waiting for business users to come to Hangouts, Google is placing one-click voice and video at the point where work already happens — the same playbook logic behind its broader enterprise outreach in mid-2014.
First-order effects
- Employees using the participating enterprise applications gain direct access to Google Hangouts calls from inside those tools, no separate app launch required.
- Google gains placement of Hangouts across third-party business software, extending its reach beyond its own properties and putting the product in front of IT buyers.
Second-order effects
- Incumbent enterprise communication vendors now compete against an option that rides on partners' existing interfaces rather than requiring its own deployment slot, shifting the contest to integration depth and pricing.
- For Google, every embedded button is an attach point for its paid business suite — the more Hangouts touches a workflow, the stronger the case for the surrounding Google Apps for Business stack.
Third-order effects
- If the embed model holds, enterprise messaging stops being a destination product and becomes an API-level service distributed through other companies' software — a structure that rewards whoever owns the communication layer under partners' apps.
The trend: Google is repositioning Hangouts from a consumer destination into an embeddable communications layer for enterprise software, betting that distribution through partner apps beats standalone adoption.