Google Apps store seeks cloud collaboration boost

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Google's new Apps Marketplace could give a significant boost to Web-based communication and collaboration software for businesses by creating a wide-ranging yet integrated virtual suite of heterogeneous cloud applications.

With Google Apps at the center of the galaxy of marketplace applications, businesses can craft a custom collaboration and communication suite featuring single sign-on and other integration points.

The Apps Marketplace will likely trigger the age-old argument of whether it's better to have a single-vendor collaboration suite or assemble "best of breed" applications from multiple vendors.

Google believes that by allowing Apps Marketplace applications to tie into the Google Apps platform through a variety of APIs (application programming interfaces) and open protocols, it can provide the best of both worlds.

"As businesses move to the cloud and get 'best of breed' apps from many vendors, that tends to represent more hassle on their part. The customer has to do the plumbing to get consistent log-ins across the applications, a consistent policy, security and administration model," said Matthew Glotzbach, a product management director for Google Enterprise. "They're really struggling with how to consume these great cloud apps from a variety of vendors."

Attempting to solve that problem is arguably the most ambitious piece of the Apps Marketplace. In addition to sharing a single sign-on, marketplace applications will also appear in the Google Apps management console, so that administrators can control from one place all their Apps domain applications, from Google and other vendors.

These external applications also appear in the Apps suite navigation bar, so that end-users have them in the same interface where they find Google Apps programs. Administrators can also control which external applications get access to what data in their domains.

"The Web works best when everyone [uses] 'best of breed' tools and connects them using open standards," said David Glazer, a Google engineering director.

Whether the Apps Marketplace fulfills this and its other promises is far from assured. As the effort's coordinator and owner of the core platform, Google must cater to different needs and wishes from many partners and customers, striking a delicate balance between ruling by decree and consensus on critical technology and business decisions.

Simultaneously, it must continue to enhance Google Apps, which must hold its appeal with current customers and attract many new ones, especially large enterprises willing to sign up for large deployments of Apps Premier, the only fee-based edition of the suite at US$50 per user per year. Otherwise, the marketplace will deflate.

Google acknowledges its Apps suite's main draw has been the fairly mature Gmail as a replacement for on-premise mail servers like Exchange. Some other pieces, like Google Docs office applications, trail counterparts like Microsoft Office in terms of features.

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