Google and Microsoft go head to head, again.

Google has just confirmed its third largest purchase behind DoubleClick and YouTube, and it points towards a consolidation of its efforts to tackle Microsoft head-on in the business applications market. The £310 million ($625 million) price has been paid for corporate security specialists Postini. With a particular emphasis on email monitoring, data encryption and compliance, the Postini acquisition would seem to be set to equalise things following the Microsoft purchase of FrontBridge a couple of years back.