Google opens up a marketplace
Last week, Google opened up a marketplace of third-party applications integrated with its Google Apps software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. This is a positive, if slightly late, move for Google, its customers, and its partner network. The marketplace is open but still immature.
Public clouds are as much ecosystem platforms as they are technology ones
The current debate about the nature, scope, and impact of public clouds rarely moves from public clouds as software/infrastructure delivery platforms to public clouds as ecosystem platforms. At that level, public cloud providers need to deliver three main types of services:
* Marketplace services: to enable customers to seek and find – as well as vendors to market and sell – applications running on, or integrated with, the public cloud (and related services).
* Business services: to enable application vendors selling their wares through the marketplace to manage user accounts, bill customers, get payments, etc.
* Community services: to enable customers to review, score, and tag applications, interact with one another as well as with vendors, provide feedback, get/provide peer support, etc.
A win-win proposition for Google, its customers, and partners
Amazon and Salesforce.com have understood the need for ecosystem services from the start. It has taken longer for Google, which only launched its Google Apps Marketplace last week. The new marketplace benefits all parties involved. It enables Google to strengthen its SaaS offering, expand its partner ecosystem, generate extra revenues, and boost customer acquisition opportunities. The company launched the marketplace with about 50 partners – not bad for a start, although big names are few and far between.
The benefit is that Google Apps customers can now get access to an expanding portfolio of pre-integrated applications via an interface they are familiar with. The marketplace focuses on US SMEs at the moment, but a more consumer-centric marketplace is likely to follow linked to Google Chrome browser and OS. Large enterprise-focused partners are likely to join in, and the marketplace will develop a more international flavor in time.
Google Apps Marketplace enables independent software vendors (ISVs) and individual developers to reach out to the worldwide Google Apps customer base of 25 million+ users, including 2 million+ businesses. Most of them use the free standard version though, hence the fact that many applications in the new marketplace have a free version.
An open marketplace
The Google Apps Marketplace is an open offering that does not constrain integrated applications to:
* use a predefined data model (as is the case for Salesforce.com and Intuit’s marketplace)
* run on the Google Application Engine (GAE) PaaS offering (although some applications, such as Socialwok, do so).
This will make it easier for partners to join in. Google provides ISVs, VARs, and SIs with a wide range of well-documented APIs and additional integration facilities such as Gmail contextual gadgets, currently in beta, to get access to users’ email at the exact point in time they are reading it and present information or features to take action on that information.
Next we would expect Google to integrate its marketplace with third-party ones in a move similar to the initiative that Microsoft and Intuit launched in January 2010 (for more information see Microsoft and Intuit team up in the cloud).
More business services to follow
The Google Apps Marketplace is not a beta offering (as is usual for new Google developments) but it is nonetheless still immature.
From a payment point of view, every vendor in the marketplace is required to pay a $100 one-time, non-refundable listing fee. Only those that create a so-called ‘installable app’, which presents an 'Add it now' button to buyers, are required to share 20% of their revenues with Google. They can only do so via Google Checkout, but the Checkout payment/billing APIs are not available yet. Google promises to release them by the end of the second quarter of 2010.
As part of the newly released marketplace, Google has also created a licensing API that allows an application to query for notifications, informing it when it has been enabled or disabled for users, and to query which domains are currently licensed to use the application. In the future Google promises to deliver more detailed usage analytics.