Google is reportedly seeking more business appeal with some upcoming G Suite improvements in a bid to better compete with rival company Microsoft in the enterprise market, according to a new report which cites Google making improvements to the capabilities of its video conferencing tools as well as those used by employees in the business market to communicate by voice.
Wolverine, one of the projects that Google is said to be currently working on will be a business-based VoIP service that will allow voice calls to route in and out of the company. Microsoft already offers something very similar with Skype for Business, so it seems clear that Google is looking to potentially steal away some of Microsoft’s customers, or would-be customers, with whatever Wolverine turns out to be once it’s ready for the market as a fully-fledged product. When that will be doesn’t seem to have been mentioned at this point. There also isn’t really much detail aside from the above-information about Wolverine other than the fact that it’s cloud-based and that it might end up helping Google make improvements to the video calling feature in Hangouts, which would likely be the video conferencing improvements that were referenced.
In addition to Wolverine, Google is also said to working on another project that will allow companies to manage the data of their users. There’s no name for the service yet, at least not one that’s been publicly stated, but it will reportedly cost $8 a month for each user that the company will need to manage data for. Google was also apparently questioning G Suite customers asking about the tools they use to manage this sort of data which adds to the suggestion that it has something in the works that it would be seeking to push to customers that would help it compete with Microsoft Active Directory, a similar service that offers the same kind of functionality. These upcoming improvements to G Suite will likely serve to put Google in a better position to help businesses operate, though they would only be the latest set of improvements that Google would be making. G Suite has had plenty of enhancements and feature additions over the past year, one of the most recent being the inclusion of the support for new languages and categories for its work apps, which Google announced back in the middle of December 2017.