By positioning the site as an effort to “beat Microsoft” the press and analysts cast the search giant Google in an underdog role. Google claims to have about two million businesses using either free or paid versions of Google Apps (I would be inthe “free” category). By comparison, the WSJ reporters observe that there are “around 500 million users of Microsoft Office”, according to the Microsoft spokespeople. That means there’s a long way to go to reach parity.

Yet, as Google adds more store-like qualities to the Solutions Marketplace, the site will take on the “recombinant qualities” of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, which actively enlists third-party developers to build solutions that incorporate their software with resources in the SalesCloud or ServiceCloud. It is also expected to take on some of the qualities of the AppStore in Apple’s iTunes site, featuring product reviews, success stories and perhaps mechanisms to support user ratings.

Today, in classic Google style, the site features a lot of white space and blue links to landing pages which, in many cases, are blogs running on the original Blogger resource (Blogger’s parent, Pyra Labs, was acquired by Google in 2003). I’m not sure how the idea that Google is launching a “store” for business apps became “news”. Clearly it’s already up and running in the Solutions Marketplace. For instance, if you search the marketplace for “telephony” products you already find four products/services ranging from a unified directory utility to tools for building mashups based on the Android mobile operating system or Asterisk “open source” PBX.

Nonetheless, the news story was good stimulus to revisit the Google Web site to see how far The Sultan of Search has come in enlisting third-party software to augment its own cloud-based offering.

The originator of Collaboration Spaces, ClackPoint, now has a new owner: Voxeo.

In November, Voxeo garnered $9 million in venture funding from North Atlantic Capital and the Florida Growth Fund. At the time, CEO Jonathan Taylor acknowledged that he would put the new funding to use to make strategic acquisitions to strengthen the core positioning as a provider of “unlocked communications”. Though it says its offering is “in beta” ClackPoint has made widgets, gadgets and API’s that designed to allow its end-users to “unlock” virtual conference rooms by entering the room number over the phone or through Web-based services.

It is a timely acquisition by Voxeo. The dominant forces in Web-based conferencing, led by the likes of Cisco with its its acquisition or Tanberg, Microsoft with video over OCS and Avistar with the introduction of new versions of its core desktop conferencing resources, expect such services to move downmarket by lowering the cost of entry and operation. With the addition of ClackPoint, Voxeo is investing in a company that has anticipated such a move.

Enter Empirix, whose “Hammer” technology helped define the business of quality assurance testing in contact centers (since 1992) and more recently for IP-based network services and networking components. Today, Empirix is formally launching Emprix Testing as a Service(TM), in response to a growing need from companies who are making major investments in a wide range of self-service resources and require highly customized (and dynamic) quality assurance testing that won’t add to the capital budget.

The “Testing as a Service” approach enables Empirix to scale the service quickly and almost indefinitely and to do so at predictable levels of operating expense. While this is the formal “launch,” the efficacy of the approach has been borne out by live implementations at a large mail-order clothing merchandiser and a major North American utility. In the first case, the company was making a major investment in new IP-based infrastructure to support traffic needs through the next five years. They knew they had sufficient capacity for call handling and voice processing, but wanted to be sure that the customer experience would not suffer, especially during seasonal spikes in caller activity. A five-month project uncovered some issues that would arise under stress and were able to tune the voice processing system to the point where there were only 20 errors in the course of 40,000 calls per week. The utility used the service to provide regulators with evidence that it complied to requirements that contact centers be available to receive calls in the event of emergency. Empirix simulated and measured the ability to deliver calls to the correct sites and provided reports that certified compliance to the government requirements.

The value of testing is its ability to detect potential problems in advance. Major infrastructure providers, like Avaya, Cisco and Genesys, partner with Empirix to provide their prospects with the confidence they need to justify the acquisition and deployment of a new system. Empirix’s services model should be a welcome innovation to the equipment providers because they are no longer vying for the same discretionary capital spending budget items. That means that Empirix’s goal and role is to be a trusted provider of “end-to-end” quality assurance testing based on a combination of experience and vertical knowledge.

Non-Clients – Click Here to View the Report Summary