I’ve posted before about Google’s uphill climb towards being an enterprise IT solutions provider. The process is sort of below the radar, but looking at it in a bit of detail reveals some interesting things about how the company operates.

Google makes a lot of blog headlines and even some old-school journalism headlines when it does things like announce a revolution in their core capacity (real time search), a new operating system (Chrome OS), or something that defies categorization (Google Wave). In the midst of all that marquee activity little developments can get lost. For example, today ReadWriteWeb reports that “Google Groups Joins Google Apps in Battle for the Enterprise“:

Google Apps is adding Google Groups to its enterprise suite of applications, another example of Google’s commitment to developing an online application environment that is compelling enough for users to move off the Windows platform.

Google Groups has to this point been a consumer service. As part of Google Apps, it now integrates with Google Docs, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Sites and Google Video.

Google Groups is a very useful and very popular way to communicate and collaborate. It’s basically a tool for threaded conversations with many participants, but there are strong additional features like (not surprisingly) search, user rating of posts, tracking of flagged threads, email privacy protection, and public Web pages for groups that function sort of like Wikis. Groups might not have a place in every business or organization that might consider deploying the Google Apps suite, but it will no doubt be quite useful to some of them.

And I think that’s an important shift in the tone of the whole Google Apps issue. It’s not about Google just providing cloud-based alternatives for core IT functions. It’s about Google reorienting enterprise IT towards a more diverse range of potential solutions. RWW includes the following useful illustration in their post:

Slide illustrating the increase in the number of services included with Google Apps from 2007 to 2009

(It’s not entirely clear, but it looks as if this may have come from a Google slide deck, or some similar origin…)

That’s a lot of additional value in just two years, and for no additional dollars. Of course, most of those tools existed before as free consumer versions—it’s not as though these are all new products.

But it’s not just an increase in quantity, it’s a difference in kind. Groups might be great, but Google Apps could have a case as an enterprise IT solution without it. That’s certainly not true of Email and arguably not true of a calendar tool and word processor/spreadsheet application. The three icons listed under 2007 are much more critical that any of the ones added since. Moreover, they’re likely to come in handy in almost any deployment. The rest will probably be found useful by some but extraneous by others.

Doesn’t that make packaging it all together a bad deal? Shouldn’t Google offer a lower rate to organizations that only want a limited feature set? Why aren’t things like SSL security or video priced separately so that only those that need them have to pay for them?

Well, that wouldn’t be as simple. That’s important to Google’s goal of an evolving market for IT solutions for at least two reasons. First, Google is asking customers to make one big decision—to migrate important functions to the cloud. Stacking a bunch of little micro-decisions on top of that only reduces the chance of getting people to make that (potentially radical) change. It would almost be like giving those who might be nervous about the proposition an excuse to dawdle.

Second, Google doesn’t want “customers.” They want people to pay them money for their products and services but they don’t want to be taking calls, whether about upgrading accounts or providing tech support. That might seem like a strong claim, but the fact that Apps users who run into trouble are directed towards third-party “authorized resellers” for support provides decent evidence for it.

This sounds a lot like the “large-scale utility model” that Nick Carr has described as the inevitable direction of the could computing industry. For one flat fee you get Google-power piped into your organization. Don’t know how to use it right? That’s not Google’s problem, call a contractor. You don’t call the water utility when your drain is clogged either.

This is very much an story still in progress and we’ll have to see how it unfolds. One thing that is clear, however, is that Google is establishing its own model for how to operate in this space.