As you may have noticed already I am an unabashed Google skeptic — at least when it comes to Google in the enterprise. They have yet to show me they are truly committed to the enterprise space, and the customers they have shown thus far have frankly been a bit disappointing; they are mostly small, techie, and or higher education. The pace of product innovation has been slow — how long has it been now since I lost my bet with Rob Koplowitz about GoogleGears? — and the numbers Google provides for the size of the business are dramatically skewed by the Postini acquisition.

Today Google announced a webinar with Genentech. The $12bn pharmaceutical will discuss its 12,000 employee implementation of Google Calendar. As best I can tell that represents the entire employee base for the company. Impressive. We’ll have to keep a close eye on how deep the Google apps suite works its way into the company — I’d like to hear that Google is running Genentech’s email, a truly mission critical app, but calendar is big step in the right direction. A few more customer examples like this and a lot of CIOs will look at Google with fresh eyes.

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