What Should Google Do With $33 Billion In Cash?

When it comes to cash on hand, Google’s war chest has grown to roughly $33 billion, according to YCharts. That’s a lot of money by anyone’s standards. Sure, Google generates most its revenues from online advertising. But throughout 2010, we heard about businesses, schools and government organizations embracing Google Apps. And some of those deals involved channel partners working within the Google Apps Reseller program. So what should Google do with its $33 billion war chest? Here are five areas worth watching.

1. Buy or Build A Real VOIP Solution: Whether it’s by partnership, acquisition, or internal development, Google is going to need to burn some cash on a real cloud-based enterprise telephony solution combining the best of their free Gmail calling feature, Google Voice, and the kind of floating presence integration seen in the upcoming Microsoft Lync.

2. Buy or Build CRM and ERP in the Cloud: This is less of an action item, but Zoho Apps is experiencing its own SaaS success by doing what Google won’t – specifically, providing enterprise-grade applications like project management and CRM – and then selling it in the Google Apps Marketplace. While the point of the marketplace is for developers to fill gaps in Google offering, a CRM system doesn’t seem like it’s too far out for Google to consider bringing in-house as a new revenue driver.

3. How About Some Native Mobile Google Docs Applications?: In every conversation with Google I’ve ever had, they say that this is never coming. As a web company, they have no interest in applications outside the browser (except, perhaps, the browser itself). All the same, something to let users edit documents for later upload when perhaps travelling abroad would be a nice value-add to the service.

4. Social Network, Take 2: Salesforce Chatter has proven that there’s room for an enterprise-grade social network. While Google Buzz was largely DOA, Google has the infrastructure, the talent, and the hard-won experience to invest in a second, better try.

5. Google Chrome OS Netbooks For TalkinCloud’s Staff – Just saying.

TalkinCloud takes a closer look at Google Apps and the Google channel partner strategy later this week. Be sure to check back for more coverage.

Follow Talkin’ Cloud via RSS, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for Talkin’ Cloud’s Weekly Newsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Read our editorial disclosures here.