App Stores have been around for a while, but mostly for cell phones, and very few business applications. Google is making a big move into online enterprise applications with the Google Apps Marketplace already stocked with over 50 real business applications. Google Apps boasts 25 million users at more than 2 million companies, and growing very fast. Startups and small software companies love the App Store concept because it allows them to focus on building great applications while the App Marketplace takes care of sales, marketing, billing, and accounting. Google is building a vibrant ecosystem around Google Apps, enabling companies to innovate, and helping them sell directly to business customers.
The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:
- Intuit Online Payroll: A small business application that offers business owners a new way to efficiently run payroll, pay taxes and let employees check paystubs all within one integrated online office environment.
- Manymoon: The company's free work and project management application for Google Apps makes it simple for businesses and teams to organize and share information including tasks, projects, documents, status updates and links with co-workers, customers and partners.
- Professional Services Connect (PS Connect): This new cloud-based offering coming soon from Appirio, pulls contextually relevant information on people, projects, customers and transactions from a user's domain and surfaces it directly inside a Gmail message so services professionals can make more informed, real-time decisions.
- JIRA Studio: A hosted software development suite from Atlassian enables software developers to flow naturally between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other design and development tools in order to better track and manage project issues and workflow.
Once installed to a company's domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike. That's the power of the cloud.
More than just a store – There are lots of “solutions marketplace” style web sites that list lots of different applications. But, they are basically just links to another web site where you can purchase the software, download, install, provision, and handle integration on your own. Why not make it easy? Why not have one place to purchase applications that are already integrated, use Single Sign On (SSO), and launch-able from within your email app? That is the idea behind Google Apps Marketplace.
Developers, Developers, Developers – Building a vibrant ecosystem on a business platform is all about developers. Giving developers an easy way to sell their products to millions of customers is a big plus. Making it easy to integrate, providing rich APIs, and developer support are essential. This is my new job at Google. The Google Apps Developers Team at Google is here to help developers from any size company build great new applications. Email me if you have an application for the Google Apps Marketplace, or if you need help getting started.
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