Google to team up with IBM again

Not content with its plans to corner the Small and Medium Business market (SMB), IBM is now apparently looking to strike a deal with Google which would help it flog desktop applications to big businesses.

On Thursday, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, met with a group of major IBM partners, to discuss how a collaborative effort could be beneficial to both companies. Google sees the deal as a way to spread its reach and get its desktop applications out to more corporate clients.

Schmidt said that partnering with IBM and working with its network of resellers and systems integrators was "certainly one of the key planks of the strategy, because otherwise we can't reach the customers".

This would not be the first time that the two giants have worked together on a project. Last year the two agreed to work together on centralised data synchronicity, or “cloud computing” and provided computer science students in the US with complete suites of open source-based development tools, in order to help them hone their advanced programming skills, to help address the challenges of this particular computing model.

Currently, most of Google’s revenue comes from advertising cash, but the search engine giant is in the process of diversifying its revenue streams, and hopes that by putting some focus on the desktop application market, it will be able to compete with mighty-soft, and bring in some major, non ad profit.

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