As Microsoft and other traditional enterprise IT vendors cede through inaction or befuddlement territory in the mobile and online services, it seems left to a few upstarts and the titans at Google and Apple to compete over the fertile ground at the edges of the consumer/enterprise interface. Unfortunately, the competition has been lackluster and neither of the major players has shown a deep understanding of enterprise IT wants and needs or any urgency in providing for them.

Both Apple and Google have thrown some token features out, mostly to appease the consumers using their solutions rather than the IT departments at their companies. The goal seems to have been to meet the bare minimum that corporate IT will find acceptable, and even then only in areas where circumvention is more or less impossible, such as e-mail interface with industry-standard Exchange servers.

But apparently someone at these companies understands that there is a lucrative enterprise market still out there. Google's recent announcement that Apps customers would have the ability to enforce password requirements on mobile devices and to remotely wipe corporate data is an indicator that enterprise requirements are being taken seriously at some level.

This implementation reflects the ideal combination of the consumer approach to meeting enterprise needs; the flexibility of the Apps mobile sync solution allows it to deploy seamlessly onto iPhone, Nokia E-series, and Windows Mobile (and soon, Android) devices, while the administration and restrictions can be implemented at the Apps control panel by administrators without any additional intervention or deployment at the device level. This sort of simplicity and centralization is exactly what cloud solutions promise for IT departments, while allowing individuals to follow their own preferences at the device level. What could be more ideal for CIOs than to off-load the many troubles and travails of device-level support, while retaining the necessary security and service control within the IT department?

David Coursey at PC World feels this indicates that Google is spending more time on enterprise features than on the Apps themselves, and the glacial pace of Apps improvements would seem to bear this out, but I don't think the two are either related or mutually exclusive. Google, and Apple, for that matter, need to focus on detailed, robust enterprise-friendly features of this sort to expand successfully beyond the markets they have already forged from the consumer-side. In their own way, these features are every bit as important to CIOs as spreadsheet pivot tables or document scripting capabilities in the Apps themselves. If Google is aiming for the 80% solution that will solve the needs of most consumers, I would say they have hit it already with Apps; they have yet to get to that same level with enterprise features.