Google Apps Marketplace: Who’s Jumping In?

The Google Apps Marketplace cat is out of the bag, and software developers seem to be tripping over themselves to get listed. A few software companies have been shouting the reasoning behind their marketplace moves from the rooftops, calling it the herald of the emerging software as a service (SaaS) market. Here’s a roundup of what some of these companies have to say for themselves.

Among the Google Apps true believers:

• Socialwok, the social layer for Google Apps that we previously covered here, says Google Apps Marketplace was a natural choice for their business since they were already operating in the search giant’s ecosystem. “There are many SMBs already using Google Apps as their de facto group messaging and collaboration platform so integrating with Google Apps was a logical choice for us,” said Socialwok CEO Ming Yong in a prepared statement.
• For Zoho, the online messaging and collaboration suite that sometimes competes with Google, it was all about increasing user data accessibility. In a blog post titled “It Is Not About Our App, It Is About the User’s Data and Context,” Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu explains that tightly integrating their product increases workflow and productivity by making it available through the widely-used Gmail homepage.
• Google-entrenched LTech has made their Google Docs Backup and Power Panel For Google Apps products available on the marketplace with the goal of making it easier for enterprises to purchase and deploy these features.

So what we’ve learned is that the Google Apps Marketplace makes products available to a huge customer base, it extends functionality to users who might otherwise go without, and, above all, it’s easy to use it to deploy apps. That sounds exactly like what Google was going for, and developers are buying into it.