AppDirect Adds Google Apps for Work to Its Growing Cloud Services Catalogue
AppDirect, one of the leading cloud service marketplaces and management platforms, has added Google Apps for Work to its growing cloud services catalog. Now solution providers and cloud services brokers can more easily sell, onboard and provision the service, which is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the market.
“Over the past five years we have seen tremendous momentum building out our channel both for traditional VARs and born in the cloud companies,” says Daniel Saks, Co-CEO and president of AppDirect. The addition of Google Apps for Work is a significant milestone he added.
AppDirect started in the summer of 2009. Its mission: make it easy for businesses to buy and manage cloud services. Today the company reaches more than 30 million businesses worldwide. It works through a network of partners ranging from big companies such as AT&T, Comcast and IBM, to smaller organizations including Agosto.
Like others, AppDirect has seen many channel companies struggle with business transition. “There’s a huge challenge from the off-line, on-prem world to the multi-tenant world of the cloud. We’re tying to help with that transition and enable a lot of what’s going on in the cloud,” he says.
Although companies like AppDirect benefitted greatly the more individual end users began using online services such as Dropbox, it realizes that businesses still need the help and support of a trusted advisor. So it’s honed its technology to help be the back office for VARs using cloud technology. Among other things, it provides user provisioning and access, single sign-on, etc. It does this for hundreds of leading applications.
The new integration with Google Apps will help partners better integrate their offerings with multiple services and bundle them to create new value.
“It’s one thing to be able to sell Google Apps as a stand-alone service, but it’s quite a much bigger deal to be able to integrate and bundle it with other services, be they vertical-market specific solutions or department-specific such as CRM, marketing, etc.,” Saks says.
But don’t just take his word for it. Aric Bandy, the president of cloud services provider Agosto, says the new capability offers his company important upside. As a Google Tier 1 Premier Partner, Agosto already enjoys a close relationship with Google. But the new integration with the AppDirect catalog provides him an opportunity to go back to customers and engage them in conversations about taking more of their core technologies to the cloud.
“We’re seeing mass adoption of SaaS-based products,” he says, “and customers are moving core aspects of their businesses onto cloud-based solutions.”
But because that process can be cumbersome, he’s grateful to have AppDirect behind him to support his organization. "The economics of running a company like ours depend on high efficiencies,” he says. “So we look to partner with those who can help us achieve those.”
Case in point: one of Agosto’s customers uses more than 125 different SaaS-based applications. Provisioning and managing those for the customer would be a nightmare of inefficiency without the advanced capabilities that someone like AppDirect brings to the table. This includes vetting different software applications, establishing relationships with their vendors, setting terms and conditions and more. In effect, AppDirect is doing for cloud service providers what traditional distributors did for VARs in the era of on-prem solutions selling.
“AppDirect extends our ability without adding a lot to our overhead,” says Bandy.
