Leave it to Google to launch an online resource for its third-party application providers that is clean, easy-to-use and informative. In an article in the Wall Street Journal (Jan 31), Jessica Vascallaro and Nick Wingfield characterized enhancements to the Google Solutions Marketplace simply as an effort to enlist software developers “in its battle with Microsoft.” Company spokespeople said they had no imminent announcements at this time, but my own perusal of the resources on the site revealed significant progress in packaging and presenting solutions and use cases that integrate Google Apps with the cloud-based resources of SaaS and enterprise software luminaries like Salesforce.com, IBM Websphere, Microsoft Exchange and many others, as illustrated in this Solutions Marketplace Success Stories Blog.

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.

Categories: Articles

Tags: SaaS, Google, Android, Recombinant Communications, Asterisk