Google

By CIO New Zealand staff | Monday, January 11 2010

The past year has been no different for the incumbent leader of the search world – it occupies 65 percent of the global market.

Global HQ: Mountain View, California, US
Website: www.google.com
Global leader: Eric Schmidt, CEO and chairman
Local leader: Karim Temsamani, GM, Australia and New Zealand
Core activity: Web-based search products, online advertising and marketing, online communication and collaboration tools, geoweb
Revenue: US$21.8 billion (FY08 ended December)
Key customers: Advertisers, businesses using its software as a service
products or web apps
Employees: 20,222

Google has barely drawn breath since its inception in 1998. The past year has been no different for the incumbent leader of the search world – it occupies 65 percent of the global market. Yet, as Microsoft launched Bing and sealed an alliance with Yahoo!, Google continued with new product releases including the Chrome browser in late 2008, interest-based advertising, Google Voice, Google Ventures, and of course Google Wave.

Across the industry, cloud networking, virtualisation and collaboration tools are shaping up as the key focus areas for IT.

The maturity of Google’s cloud applications mean it is well positioned to muscle in on these areas.

Google Analytics has also enjoyed a big push. Google is moving into entertainment, with subsidiary YouTube in discussions with movie studios about using the platform to rent movies. It is not all smooth sailing for the
media giant though, with regulators increasingly uncomfortable with Google’s sheer size. Rachael Bolton