Google Opens Apps Marketplace 54
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."
Link to the marketplace. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Too much lock-in. (Score:3, Informative)
There's no lock in. You can list an app and leave the whole thing as third party with no integration with Google Apps.
If I'm some random Google user and I use Gmail, Calendar, and other apps every day, and I also use Joe's Hosted Task Manager, it would be very convenient for that to be in the google apps tabs and on my google apps domain.
Also more predictable expenses (Score:4, Informative)
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:More Google Control (Score:2, Informative)
I work for one of the vendors mentioned in the summary.
Google has nothing to do with the services provided by the vendors in the marketplace aside from inviting them to participate in the first place. They certainly don't own the services or even have any control over them. We still host our product and store any data on our "own" (well our hosting partner's) infrastructure in exactly the same manner if you buy our product without enabling the Google apps integration.