Google’s GrandCentral Acquisition: Major shift in the VOIP market?
By Krish on Jun 25, 2007 in Industry Analysis
According to Mike Arrington, Google has acquired GrandCentral. You can follow the blogosphere buzz on this news here. In my opinion, this is a smart move by Google. Google has been pushing its Gtalk application for a long time. They integrated Gtalk with Gmail sometime back and, recently, they also created a Gtalk gadget. In spite of all these efforts, they couldn’t catch up with Microsoft, Yahoo and Skype in the IM/VOIP segment. With this GrandCentral acquisition, they have a good chance to find some traction in the market and create a killer VOIP application. Google has already bought Marratech, a cross platform video chat application. GrandCentral, Google Talk and Marratech’s video platform can turn out into a killer Voice and Video Over IP app (VVOIP).
I have been using GrandCentral since the time they launched. I am pretty impressed with their features and I am quite convinced that it could turn out to be a Telco killer. Already GrandCentral is integrated with Gizmo Project. You could receive the calls on your Gizmo Project software/hardware, whenever someone calls your GrandCentral number. So the Gtalk integration is a trivial next step. This acquisition gives some insights into Google’s plan for the VOIP segment. This also gives Google an opportunity to fight back against Yahoo-Ebay combo if the rumors turn out to be true.
I really don’t understand the valuation or the integration that GrandCentral as a unified communications offering provides anyone. Google is a search company with negligible revenues from anything other than being a search company. If they really want to go after a unified communications company take a look at the companies that real customers like Innoport.com or J2 Communications.
As a shareholder, I’m a bit miffed at how Google spent any money on GrandCentral let alone several million.
jose | Sep 1, 2007 | Reply
Jose, it fits well into Google’s original strategy of organizing all of world’s information. One immediate advantage I could think of, apart from offering an unified communication product, is that it gives Google access to people’s voices. It will help them streamline their GOOG 411 offering and any voice recognition based product of the future. My 2 cents.
Krish | Sep 5, 2007 | Reply