How Google could take a hefty piece of the SMB market.

No matter how you build a network you sooner or later want to login to something locally. It may be a printer, a firewall, NAC, intranet or a wireless network.

With Google Apps all your accounts are in the "cloud" and there arent any easy way accessing them from a local network, especially before you have been connecterd to the net.

Google could in theory put together a key-turn server where the accounts in Google Apps are synced to a local server that handles nothing more fancy than LDAP and Radius.

This way a  new company could easily use Google apps and this LDAP server as the foundation for other services that are local. Im currently working on implementing Google Apps myself and this is what i lack. I dont want to run a Novell, Microsoft or SUN server, i just want a simple way of having local access to the accounts in the cloud.

I manage to setup my own LDAP/Radius but most SMB dont. Bring this missing key and i think many more companies will consider Google Apps.