What to Make of Google's Acquisition of Postini?

Google's decision to acquire Postini for $625 million makes sense for both companies: Google benefits by acquiring robust technology to protect its messaging and Apps infrastructure, and Postini benefits by expanding its reach to a potentially much broader audience.

That said, how will Postini's customer base view the acquisition? One of Postini's strengths has been that it processes messages in memory and doesn't maintain a copy unless the customer turns spooling capabilities on, which was a key reason that Postini did so well early on in the legal vertical. An individual with whom I spoke this morning suggested that the Google acquisition might be perceived as changing the level of security and privacy that Postini customers have enjoyed given that Google is perceived, perhaps wrongly, of mining data quite aggressively.