Google Opens Apps Marketplace

snydeq writes "Google has launched the Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications. The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites, and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap, and Zoho. Participation in Google Apps Marketplace is open to customers of the Premier, Standard, and Education editions of Google Apps. Applications are linked to the marketplace via REST Web services and APIs including OpenID and OAuth."

Comments

Link to the marketplace.

[bertoelcon]

I don't see it here or the TFA so http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/home

Re:More Google Control

[ScrewMaster]

While I see the benefits of this, I can't help but see that all these things can be easily manipulated into Google "owning" the services using this

Sure. But this is still better than Apple's ecosystem.

Too much lock-in.

[Seor Jojoba]

Maybe if this was based on an open standard defining how to implement the same services on a non-Google platform, this would all be more palatable.

Re:Too much lock-in.

[IamTheRealMike]

OpenID and OAuth are open standards.

Re:remember the motto

[sakdoctor]

Evil? There's an app for that.

Trusting Google

[linuxguy]

I don't have too much trouble trusting Google. They haven't done anything yet that would make me lose that trust. They have a lot riding on maintaining that trust with their users. I have more of a problem trusting the smaller companies (app developers) with my data. They don't depend on my trust as much.

Re:remember the motto

[shutdown -p now]

Nah, it was recently removed from App Store because it was found to be competitor to Apple products.

Also more predictable expenses

[PCM2]

It's not just "instant gratification." CFOs like expenses they can get their heads around. They pay a monthly bill for the lights, for the phones, for their lease. Traditional software, on the other hand, can be pretty hard to budget effectively. How many heads do you need to count for licenses? When will the new version be released, and how long should you wait to upgrade? Sun Microsystems switched to a per-employee, per-month licensing scheme for its software (based on the total size of your organization, not the number of machines that would have the software installed) and it claimed its customers were much happier with the new way of reckoning cost.

The other part of it, of course, is what you allude to. The sticker price of any on-premise software is just a small fraction of its total cost of ownership. You need the hardware to deploy it on, plus hardware to QA patches. But the real cost is in the ongoing maintenance required to keep it running, secure and up to date. With cloud services you roll those costs into the monthly fee. No more haggling the price of health insurance, vacation time, redundant employees for maintenance roles and the managers to supervise them. The quoted price is what you pay. That's appealing to a lot of business managers.

Re:Also more predictable expenses

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that they could be making a play for the smallish business segment(not that they'd actively turn down big ones; but that they have the greatest initial hopes there.

In a large company or organization, you can afford to hire the right people and build the right infrastructure to get handy stuff like single sign on(except for that one crap legacy app that everybody hates; but so it goes), user configurations that follow users between machines, backups that actually work, a network infrastructure that isn't a complete clusterfuck, standardized hardware and system images, and the like. Plus, over a large enough userbase, the somewhat bursty and unpredictable day-to-day IT costs can be averaged into something resembling a "TCO per capita" number that isn't a complete lie, which keeps the bean counters happy.

The smaller you get, though, the less likely that these things are true(particularly in businesses run by non techies. Your one man linux kernel development consultancy is probably Just Fine Thanks. Bob's Indy Auto Body is probably an IT disaster waiting to happen on a small scale). For a smaller outfit, having the technical expertise and infrastructure to provide the features that enterprises take for granted is hard. Having a decent admin permanently on staff is expensive overkill; but having to depend on consultants and geek squad visits is very pricey per-incident, can mean seriously uneven quality of service, and is hard to predict and budget for.

If Google can use the third party offerings to fill out the missing aspects of its Docs and Gmail offerings(payroll, accounting, any number of domain-specific software oddities), they could have a very compelling offering for a smaller business without much in-house technical expertise: Works on basically any modern computer with a browser and an internet connection, single sign on, some degree of integration between email, documents, and calendar, and a familiar interface, backups happen silently and automatically for you, all for some predictable subscription fee. Geeks with the chops to DIY, or larger outfits who can afford proper IT staff have had all this for some time, and will be harder to sway(geeks are likely to be cheap and/or afraid of Google's sinister intentions, large outfits will have legacy baggage of one sort or another); but a lot of smaller businesses have basically the same quality IT as home users(none at all, totally fucked); but with a good bit more money on the line.

Re:I hope this cloud bullshit ends soon.

[severoon]

You guys don't get it. Apps developed for the cloud have to be infinitely scalable...if they don't scale well, the cloud provider is happy to just keep adding machines and charging you for your crappy workmanship. Google's App Engine (GAE) goes one step beyond by providing a container into which you can deploy your app, and the restrictions placed upon your app is to guarantee that it's well-behaved in terms of scalability.

For all you PHB's that read this site: this is for your benefit, not theirs, to keep your technical people from doing all the stupid things they're free to do on Amazon EC2 that costs you lots of money. And it's also why companies like RightScale can provide OTT services for EC2 and charge you...to manage a lot of the technical drudgery that goes along with doing what GAE gives you for free, provided you understand why you have to comply with the requirements of their container. (Once you understand that, you realize that even if you're developing for EC2 you should follow all the same restrictions in your development anyway, or you'll end up with runaway scaling problem.)

Re:I hope this cloud bullshit ends soon.

[mrboyd]

It's not the solution for everyone but it sure is one for my 5 employees company. Google gives me an email/shared calendar/document sharing and website hosting for a ridiculously low price. We use an hosted CRM, billing and issue tracking software for a a near zero infrastructure cost and the recurring if far below what the local cisco distributor would charge us to even have 10 minute look at our setup. We wouldn't be able to afford self-hosting and maintaining a tenth of the applications we use if we had to do it in house. And most important for us at this point it works for roaming users; google app integrates well with blackberry without the need for a BES. etc.. etc..

Last week i needed to do a quick survey of our customers about a specific point and it took me all of ten minutes to set up a form using google docs; that less than the time it would have taken me to launch emacs remember the syntax for a doctype. Sure google forms sucks for anything more complex than a five bullet points questions but it beats sending excel sheet by mail.

Am I scared to have all my company information on Google's and third party servers, sure. We keep backups. I sometime wonder if it's a mistake but franckly at this point relying on Google to treat my data respectfully or relying on myself to do a decent admin works and fight off "Chinese" attack it more or less the same. The cloud is cheaper (for us).

When the company will have grown (fingers crossed) we'll re-assess the situation and most likely move things back in-house. In the mean time it's a boon for us.

TL;DR: my SMB can't afford to manage everything we use in-house. Google apps and SAAS (aka cloud) is cheaper.