google apps marketplace
In a move likely to accelerate the development and adoption of online business applications, Google on Tuesday evening launched the Google Apps Marketplace, an online store that third-party developers can use to sell their Web apps to administrators and users of both the free and paid versions of Google Apps.
The Google App Marketplace offers developers access to over 25 million Google Apps users, a group that includes some 2 million businesses.
Web apps that support OpenID-based single sign-on and OAuth-authorized access to Google Apps data can be made available to Google Apps administrators and installed in no more than four clicks. Once installed, third-party apps work just like native Google applications and are integrated with the menus in Google Apps.
"With administrator approval, [third-party apps] may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity," explains Chris Vander Mey, senior product manager for Google Apps in a blog post. "Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps."
Thanks to OpenID integration, explains Vander Mey, Google Apps users can access third-party applications without having to sign-in to each one. They also do not have to worry about updating them or manually syncing and sharing data, he says, resulting in improved productivity, a better user experience, and easier administration.
The price is a 20% share of application revenue from new customers, which must be handled through Google Checkout in the near future.
For the next few months, companies can continue to bill for Web app use on their own. Google is forgiving any revenue sharing obligation between March 9 and three months after it releases its Marketplace Billing APIs, due in the second quarter of this year. Expect to see the APIs released around Google's developer conference in May.
Exemptions from revenue sharing obligations include revenue from pre-existing customers, ad revenue, service fees for installation, consulting or support, e-commerce services that sell goods, revenue from customers who are no longer Google Apps users, tax-related charges, and revenue from customers acquired during the billing exemption period.
Web apps do not have to run on Google App Engine. Companies that wish to retain control over their applications can run them in their own data centers, so long as they can connect to Google's systems through OpenID and OAuth.
"That was a very conscious choice on our part," said Google engineering director David Glazer in a phone interview. "We think we should be providing the best tools and the best distribution for Web apps and those should not be coupled."
Google's oversight of its Apps Marketplace should be much more relaxed than Apple's management of its iTunes App Store, often criticized for its opaque and arbitrary rules.
Google does have technical compatibility requirements for the apps it sells, but its restrictions on content appear to be more permissive than Apple's. The intended audience for the Google Apps Marketplace -- business professionals -- is likely to limit the availability of cookie-cutter, soft-core apps that plague the iTunes App Store. There is a one-time $100 fee to publish listings in the Marketplace.
The Google Apps Marketplace Distribution agreement states that the company does not intend to monitor apps submitted to its store, but adds that it will remove them for intellectual property infringement, violations of the law or based on an injunction, pornography, obscenity, terms of service violations, the creation of liability for Google, malware, and ongoing user complaints.
On opening day, Google already counts more than 50 companies selling their online applications, including companies that compete with Google. On the shelves of the Google Apps Marketplace, one can find Intuit Online Payroll, Manymoon project management, Appirio's Professional Services Connect, Atlassian's JIRA Studio, and Zoho's suite of productivity and collaboration programs, among others.
"We think competition is great," said Glazer. "We believe the future is the cloud. And we're committed to the cloud for enterprises."
Raju Vegesna, evangelist for Zoho, an online productivity suite that competes in some areas with Google Apps, said in a phone interview, "We admire Google for their openness."
Zoho, he said, integrated with Google Apps on a sign-on level about six months ago. Having proceeded with ad hoc integration, he said that the company jumped at the opportunity to work more formally with Google's platform.
He said there are other Web application platforms, like Force.com, but they're not as open, because you have to build your applications on their platform. With the Google Apps Marketplace, "We can run Zoho apps in our own data center, where we have control," he said.
He believes Google will be successful because its platform is built around e-mail, which he refers to as "a commodity app." Building a platform around CRM, he suggests, doesn't make as much sense because not everyone uses CRM software.
Melissa Webster, program VP of content and digital media technologies at research consultancy IDC, sees Google's alliances shifting. She observes that Salesforce.com, a Google partner in years past, is conspicuously absent from the Google Apps Marketplace while Salesforce rivals NetSuite and SuccessFactors are featured prominently.
She also sees the App Marketplace appealing to developers.
"Google Apps have enough adoption at this point that the customer base is interesting for developers," she said in an e-mail. "I think it's interesting too how Google is pricing: The mobile apps stores give developers just 70% of the take, whereas Google's giving them 80%, so from an incentive perspective, the plan should look generous. Early adopters should have an advantage, as the catalog will be smaller and they'll have better visibility. Over time, it will become more challenging to be visible, and add-in vendors will have to do more on the marketing side to boost their popularity."
She characterizes the App Marketplace as a Google move for Google at a good time.
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