14 DAY TRIAL // The rumored Google Apps Marketplace is now official and live with more than 50 companies signed as partners at launch. The Marketplace is an online repository and application store for any third-party developer offering a cloud app with some sort of integration with Google Apps. There are apps available in a variety of categories, some free, some paid for, and their number is likely to grow fast.
"The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses," Chris Vander Mey, product manager for Google Apps Marketplace, wrote. "Once installed to a company's domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity," he explained.
Google Apps, the office and collaboration suite for businesses, schools and organizations, is already used by more than two million businesses. Between them, 25 million people are employing Google Apps in one form or another. There's certainly a big market there and both Google and third-party developers know this.
With the Google Apps Marketplace, any company, big and small, can potentially reach millions of people and the increased visibility should mean a big uptake in users, especially for smaller companies. One advantage is that the Marketplace is actually quite open and very flexible for developers.
Google keeps only 20 percent of the revenue from sales in the Marketplace, as opposed to the common 70/30 split used in the Android Market and the Apple App Store. There is only a one-time fee of $100 to register in the Marketplace, after which developers can add as many apps as they want.
For the users, things couldn't be simpler. Installing a new app takes just few clicks, but requires administrative access, obviously. The new apps will show up in the dashboard along with the Google apps and also in the 'More' menu available on all the Google apps. There's no need for a new account, thanks to OpenID, and third-party apps can interact with the default Google ones, for example by saving files in Google Docs.
Developers can keep their own domains and can build their apps in any way they want, they just need to connect with the APIs Google provides. As an indicator of the Marketplace's openness and appeal even direct competitors like Zoho, which rivals Docs, are making their apps available in the online store. Google plans to expand the Marketplace further, apart from adding new partners, by introducing more advanced payment options, further down the line in the second half of 2010, integrating Google Checkout, the company's PayPal rival.
