Google tweaks Hangouts to take on Microsoft Slack in the Enterprise space

Google wants to connect the world, and it wants enterprise to lead the way. A day after it made a big pitch for its machine learning offering on its cloud platform, the technology giant announced a slew of updates to its company-focused apps.

On the second day of its ongoing Cloud Next event here, Google announced several upgrades to its existing apps to make them more relevant for enterprises. The most relevant talk point though, was Google's revamp of its Hangout messaging platform.

On Thursday, Google said Hangouts will be available as Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat. While Meets will be the video calling option for team meetings, Hangouts Chat will let teams scattered across different areas connect with each other in virtual rooms.

Up to 30 people can join a meeting, without any downloads or browser plugins. Anyone can join from any Android or iOS device, and a dial-in phone number for each meeting helps connect employees who are on the road without WiFi/data.

Hangouts Chat would let teams use and embed content: Google's Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar and other files. Google also designed Chat to integrate with a wide set of enterprise tools and is working with companies like Asana, Box and Zendeskto.

The natural competiton for Google and several other tech giants, incuding Microsoft an FACEBOOK, in the enterprise messaging space is Slack, an enterpise collaboration app that is the preferred choice for most companies.

In video collaboration, it is Skype that takes the lead. According to an analysis by Spiceworks in January , the top-used collabrative chat app by large organisations was Skype for Business, followed by Slack and Google Hangouts.

Taking its team collaboration announcements a step further, Google also announced Jamboard -a physical, digital whiteboard that looks like a flat screen TV and lets compa ny teams spread across different locations collaborate on ideas in realtime and create without boundaries.“We're moving the whiteboard to the cloud,“ Google said in a blogpost.

Jamboard will be available initially only in the US from May for $4,999 a year and an annual $600 management and support fee. Google also announced Team Drive, which has over 800 million monthly active users.

It will let teams share and collaborate efficiently over the cloud. Following up on its commitment to the cloud market, where Google lacks rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, it also announced new capabilities for developers.

“In order for Google to deliver on this cloud promise, we must not only meet enterprise companies where they are today in terms of security , compliance, and connectivity standards -but also raise the bar for what's possible with our advanced machine intelligence capabilities,“ said Prabhakar Raghavan, vice president, apps at Google.