Rather than continuing to pay licensing fees for security applications that Google uses from Postini, they went out and bought the company for US$ 625 Million instead - making this their largest acquisition to date, and with no hidden agenda other than saving money in the long run - this also makes it one of their most public statements to date…

For articles as important as these, there a few places other than TechCrunch (unless it’s April) that we would trust for block-quoting:

Google has announced the acquisition of communications security and compliance company Postini for $625million.

Postini offers a number of on-demand communications security and compliance solutions and serves more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide. Postini’s services include message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement tools which can be used to protect a company’s email, instant messaging, and other web-based communications platforms. Notably Google was already utilizing Postini technology with Gmail; the acquisition would appear to be a case of Google wanting to own a technology it was already using under license.

Then again, we could always use Google as a source:

We launched Google Apps so that it would be easier for employees to communicate and share information while reducing the hassles and costs associated with enterprise software. Companies are responding: every day, more than 1,000 small businesses sign up for Google Apps.

Larger enterprises, however, face a challenge: though they want to deliver simple, useful hosted applications to their employees, they’re also required to support complex business rules, information security mandates, and an array of legal and corporate compliance issues. In effect, many businesses use legacy systems not because they are the best for their users, but because they are able to support complex business rules.

We realized that we needed a more complete way to address these information security and compliance issues in order to better support the enterprise community. That’s why we’re excited to share the news that we’ve agreed to acquire Postini, a company that offers security and corporate compliance solutions for email, IM, and other web-based communications.