Google is taking another step towards its goal to be a bigger player in business technology.
The search giant said on Monday that it would introduce two new cloud services for customers of its Google Apps for business, highlighting the search giant’s continued push to take on traditional big business technology suppliers like Microsoft (MSFT) and IBM (IBM).
One of the new products, Google Springboard, is a cloud service that businesses can use to search for specific information and documents that their employees store in Google Apps products like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drives and Contacts, according to a Google blog post. Google killed an earlier hardware version of the corporate search engine in February.
“As we continue to invest in applying technologies like machine intelligence to power our web search engine, we’re working on a new way to bring all of this power to the enterprise,” Prabhakar Raghavan, vice president of engineering for Google Apps, said in a blog post.
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Additionally, Google said it would debut a new version of Google Sites, which businesses can use to create internal websites that only their employers can access. Businesses can assign employees to be Google Sites “editors” who can collaborate with each other on designing the internal websites. The internal websites can also “scale and flex to any screen size” to fit on multiple computer and smartphone displays, wrote Raghavan.
Google did not say when the new services would be available, but interested businesses can sign up to an early adopter program.
In another example of its ambitions in business technology, Google recently said it had built a custom microchip for powering software services that incorporate machine-learning algorithms. The chip works with Google’s free TensorFlow software tool that businesses and developers can use to build apps with machine-learning capabilities.
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The two new services announced on Monday are being revealed on the same day that Google is hosting an enterprise event in Tokyo. Google’s head of cloud computing, Diane Greene, is expected to talk along with a few of Google’s Japanese customers like Fujitec.
