SAN FRANCISCO - Google has released a major new addition to its Google Apps Premier Edition suite of applications, Google Video. The new application, which is designed to help business customers collaborate by sharing videos, is now part of the $50 per user, per year Google suite. Current customers get Google Video as a free addition.

As with other applications in the suite, such as Docs and Spreadsheet, the creator of a document - or video - can decide whether to freely distribute it to colleague(s), or put restrictions on who can view or edit it. For the viewer, the interface includes a scene picker window on the bottom to make it easier to jump to different parts of a video.

Leveraging the same simplicity that made its YouTube video site so popular, Google is easy to operate. You can, for example, click "browse" to find a video and "upload" to share it. The videos can be viewed from standard Web browsers including Apple's Safari on the iPhone. Users can add ratings and tags and download videos for viewing offline or on a portable computer or mobile device if the creator or administrator of the video allows that.

Google Video also allows you to embed a video inside an application.

"There are specific use cases where an application like this makes sense," Rebecca Wettemen, analyst at Nucleus Research, told InternetNews.com. "Ad hoc training, for example, where you can put a video right inside a CRM application and show how to fill out forms."

Wetteman said Google's larger challenge with Apps Premier isn't just product innovation, but making enterprise IT decision makers comfortable with adopting and supporting the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering.

"Companies are becoming more accepting of Saas, buying PCs with cameras embedded in them and video is becoming easier to edit, so from a technology point of view Google's timing is pretty good," said Wetteman. "But in the enterprise, while it might be nice to share a video of the company's holiday party, there is certainly a question of what is productivity and what's a distraction.

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"The CFO of any company knows YouTube is what his teenager uses to waste time. If you're going to bring something like that into the enterprise, you have to make a clear business case for it."

While IT departments, much less managers and supervisors, aren't necessarily hot to sanction the spread of a YouTube-like tool into their business, Google said it's riding a major change, namely th e consumerization of IT.

A zero billion dollar business

"In the enterprise video is a zero billion dollar business," joked Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise in an interview with InternetNews.com. "It's been more of a corner office and specialty application because of the storage, infrastructure and management costs that have made it hard to justify using more broadly. We're hoping to change that."

Glotzbach points to two big areas of use for Google Video. First, is the traditional top down, corporate communications such as speeches by the CEO or other executives within an organization as well as training videos.

"Probably the more interesting and exciting use is going to be the bottoms up, the user generated content this is going to facilitate," he said.

Pavni Diwanji, engineering director for Google Enterprise who led the development of Google Video, said she's been surprised by how it's already being used internally at Google. "A lot of team meetings are being uploaded," she said. "Google Video is becoming a plug for enhanced collaboration."

Manesh Patel, chief information officer and senior vice president of IT, Sanmina-SCI sees Google Video benefiting his company. "Cost and complexity have until now limited the effective use of video to improve business functions," said Patel in a statement.

"The integration of video into Google Apps, combined with continuing improvements in video devices and network infrastructure, provides significant opportunities for innovation and saving throughout our global teams."

Because Google Apps Premier is SaaS, Google manages the storage and access. Google Video is capped at 3GB per user across a domain so, for example, if you're a thousand user domain you have up to 3 terabytes of shared video storage (i.e. individual users aren't limited to 3GB).

Already, among testers, Glotzbach said there have been numerous requests to add a "publish to YouTube" feature. He said it's something Google is likely to add in a future version while including specific administrative controls about what videos, if any, can be sent to YouTube for public consumption.