This week, I'm in San Francisco.  I've been at a conference for SalesForce.com (NYSE: CRM), as well as for  Informatica (Nasdaq: INFA).

Well, interestingly enough, a topic of conversation is Google and its move into the corporate market (especially corporate search).

The buzz is that Google has over 1 million CPUS and is the biggest buyer of electricity in California.  Basically, Google is building the ultimate Web services platform -- which can host both consumer and corporate applications.

For example, at the Salesforce.com conference, the company's CEO, Marc Benioff, mentioned he is thinking of moving his corporate email to GMail.  This is a possibility since Google has a new system that allows companies to have web-based email using their own domain names.  You can check it out at www.google.com/hosted.

But the corporate market can be tricky. For example, at the Salesforce.com conference, David Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google's Enterprise business unit, gave a presentation of his solutions. Problem?  Well, he couldn't seem to log in. After a couple minutes, he then went into a slide show presentation.

Actually, I had a chance to talk to James Markarian, who is the CTO at Informatica.  He has spent his career dealing with the complexities of corporate IT environments. He thinks the transition for Google into corporate search will be a challenge.

First of all, security is absolutely critical.  Corporate data has much more confidential information than the consumer Web.  There are also new regulations that have severe consequences, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

There is something else: corporate data is often associated with an application. For example, suppose you are searching for HR information. Well, a search engine will need to deal with a variety of ERP systems, such as for Oracle, SAP and so on.

In other words, to be successful, Google will need to partner with many firms – as well as deal with the intricacies of different solutions.

This is something that Informatica specializes in. And, it has spent 15 years dealing with these issues.

So, in the case of Google, its conquering of corporate America is a lofty goal – but is likely to be a marathon not a sprint.