Google Launches Apps Marketplace
SMB / SME, SaaS March 9th, 2010
I’m at the Google Campfire One event where they’ve just announced the Google Apps Marketplace. The site is live now, feel free to browse. The speculation is now over, this is Google’s answer on whether they will enter the Business Applications market – they just did, with an entire ecosystem of Partners.
The new Marketplace fills an obvious need: Google Apps has 25 million users at over 2 million businesses who clearly need more than just the communication / collaboration / Office type applications Google can offer today. Here’s a chart of some of the initial Marketplace participants:
As you can see, the list represents a wide range of partners – some are very obvious fit, others bring questions re. future business model. Just picking a few randomly, I can easily see how electronic signature management vendor Echosign, the obviously named eFax or meeting scheduler Timebridge expands Google Apps functionality, and they are all easy to use applications. Spanning Backup is a brand new product just launched days ago, but they’ve established credibility with the previous product, Spanning Sync.
At the other end of the scale we have fairly complex offerings represented by NetSuite and Successfactors. For SMB SaaS ERP and HRM (yup, lots of acronyms) offerings integrating Web based office apps or email is a natural fit, but these companies have a very different sales and implementation model: far from the simple test-buy-click-to-install model they have a longer, more traditional sales cycle, a few weeks of implementation work, training..etc. It will be interesting to see how their presence at the Marketplace plays out, and which side generates more deals for the otherl.
Then there’s Zoho (dislosure: Zoho is sponsoring CloudAve, my main blogging gig). On one hand, clearly competing with Google, on the other hand, partnering where reasonable. My personal opinion has been for a while that Google should have acquired Zoho long ago, offering a killer combo of Gmail+ GCal and the Zoho Business Apps to the SMB space. Obviously neither Google nor Zoho thought it was their best interest (and not mine, either, why would I want to lose our Sponsor…), but they finally met at the Marketplace:-) Kudos to Google for playing fair with co-opetitors in the interest of their Customers, unlike that other company that booted Zoho from their Appexchange when they did not agree to kill Zoho CRM… CRM is now Zoho’s best selling product, and Google Apps users will now have easy access to it, as well as to Zoho Projects. Zoho Meeting will soon be integrated, too.
Talk about integration, Google published extensive API’s for integration of 3rd party programs to Apps, the Marketplace allows easy discovery of such apps and there’s also a commercial model, eventually offering billing on the software vendors’ behalf, for a 20% cut. For now the actual purchase transaction takes place outside Google, but once it’s completed, Administrators of a Google Apps domain can simply enable the new apps which will be accessible via Google’s Universal Navigation.
Other then for the obvious reasons – users / customers having more choice, I am happy about this launch because I think if any company, Google has the clout to actually expand the market, and in a way influence user behavior, moving us all, consumers and business alike from the traditional sales-heavy model to a pull-model, where we try-click-to buy. I wrote about this ’shift’ in detail in the previous post .
Stay tuned for more analysis from Ben who will look at the details as well as competing Apps Markets, and from Krish who will look at some individual offerings.

(Cross-posted @ CloudAve )
Tags: CloudAve, Google, Google App Marketplace, Google Campfire One, netsuite, zoho
Fun Video from FakeOffice.org
Humor, SaaS November 8th, 2009
Tags: CloudAve, fakeoffice, Humor, music video, web apps, web office, zoho
SAP and Zoho Come Together
SaaS September 28th, 2009
At least on screen… Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu delivers his keynote @ NASSCOM, and what’s the background? SAP Business ByDesign.
Business ByDesign: probably the best All-in-One SaaS suite NOT (quite) on the market today. 
Tags: A1S, bbd, business bydesign, byd, nasscom, SaaS, sap, zoho
That’s a Report I Like to See
Blogging August 3rd, 2009
Courtesy of site24×7 by Zoho. Thanks to my host, PressHarbor.
Tags: blog hosting, pressharbor, site24x7, zoho
Google Replaces Beta Tag With Price Tag on Apps
Collaboration, Personal Productivity, SaaS July 7th, 2009
Just a short note:
- After 5 years Google Apps are no longer considered Beta.
- They may not be free for long? The free version is still available, but takes some digging to find – I wonder if it’s intentional…
Guess who will welcome GooGreed with a big smile? Zoho.
Update: TechCrunch has the clarification from Google:
In experimenting with a number of different landing page layouts, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped from one of the variations. We are in the process of restoring it and you should see it soon. We have no intention of eliminating Google Apps Standard Edition, and are sorry for the confusion.
Related posts:
- Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises
- Gmail leaves beta, launches “Back to Beta” Labs feature
- Google finally rips the beta label off Gmail and other Google Apps
- Google Apps Premier Demo Accounts
Tags: beta, beta software, freemium, gmail, Google, google apps, googreed, office, Personal Productivity, SaaS, zoho
Two recent posts by Enterprise Social Software vendors Jive and Atlassian set up a huge debate amongst my fellow Enterprise Irregulars. Here’s the money-quote from Jive:
It’s not so long ago that it felt embarrassing to say the words "SaaS" and " single-tenant" in the same sentence. For years, it’s been an industry mantra that it’s simply impossible to have a scalable SaaS business without multi-tenancy.
Both Jive and Atlassian went single-tenant. That’s a red flag with many SaaS purists. But there’s more then just tenancy. What if customer data stays behind the firewall, while the application is still provided over the web? Is that still considered SaaS? Do customers really care about such issues, or do they look for innovation in features and services?
And a bonus: the #1 SaaS icon supposedly delivers on-premise, if the deal is big enough…
Tags: atlassian, cloud computing, CloudAve, data security, Enterprise Software, infrastructure, jive, multi-tenant, On-Demand, on-premise, private cloud, readwriteweb, SaaS, salesforce.com, sharepoint, single-tenant, software architecture, software as a service, tenancy, zoho
Zoho Office for Sharepoint: Use SaaS, Keep Data Behind the Firewall
Collaboration, Enterprise Software, SaaS June 23rd, 2009
One of the major roadblocks to SaaS providers’ entry to the enterprise is IT and Business concerns about corporate security, thinking of the firewall as the last line of defense.
Microsoft SharePoint has a very strong position in the Enterprise as the incumbents behind-the-firewall collaboration server, and for years smart Collaboration and Social Software vendors with better functionality, like Atlassian, Socialtext, Jive Software, Newsgator have been "playing well", adopting their services to SharePoint.
Now Zoho joins, announcing Zoho Office for Microsoft SharePoint, which combines the benefits of a collaborative SaaS Suite with the (perceived or real?) security if keeping data behind the firewall.
Tags: Collaboration, Exchange, firewall, Google, microsoft, ms office, Outlook, SaaS, security, sharepoint, zoho, zoho suite
Ma.Gnolia Data Loss – Is Your Data Safe?
SaaS January 30th, 2009
Ma.gnolia, a social bookmarking service is down, lost all their user data and they don’t know if / when they can recover.
This is as bad as it can get for any Web 2.0 service (and more importantly for users), and the backlash against Cloud services has already started. My first reaction is taking Stowe Boyd’s approach – a quick overview of how safe my own data is.
Update: also read Krish’s post @ ClouDave: Magnolia Effect – Should We Trust The Clouds?
Tags: backup, data backup, flickr, gmail, Google, live mesh, mozy, online backup, online sync, synchronization, syncplicity, web services, zoho


Zoho is mostly known for their Web-based productivity and business software, but sometimes they venture into … hmm…
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Zoli Erdos