In the next few weeks a billion-dollar U.S. software giant will announce its newest channel partners, including a “prominent Canadian company.”
The vendor is not Microsoft or IBM. It’s Google, the online search business which gets the overwhelming amount of its revenues from advertising.
Many VARs may not know, but Google also makes and sells rack-mounted search appliances with prices from US$3,000 to US$600,000. And while these are sold online or through its direct sales force, last fall it launched a partner program to help sales.
Yes, Google wants you.
Do you want it? Do you want to partner with a company that has some $8 billion in cash to spend and gives away software which may compete with products you sell?
Yes, says Matthew Glotzbach, product manager for Google Enterprise, the division responsible for the company’s for-pay products and enterprise search tools.
“When you join our partner program you get access to our technologies – we actually give our partners a development version of our search appliances so they can do development and testing, a week of hands-on business and technical training and on-going support from our technical teams.”
The goal is “to create an ecosystem around Google’s enterprise products.”
So far Google has signed some 60 partners in the U.S. and Europe, mostly small ISVs or consultants with a speciality. But one of them is BearingPoint, an international systems integrator which has opened a search practice and is standardizing on Google.
“There’s a lot of opportunity these companies, large and small, can capitalize on,” says Glotzbach.
One of the latest – he won’t say which until the announcement – is that Canadian company.
There is a price: An annual fee of US$10,000.
However, don’t talk about hardware margins. Partners don’t actually sell the appliances, said Glotzbach, Google does. The partner benefits from consulting and integration work, as well as possible custom development of Google Enterprise Desktop and Toolbar.
Partner stories
That doesn’t faze two of its U.S. channel partners.
“There is a synergy,” says John Bernardi, vice-president of business development of StoredIQ, an early-stage company in Austin, Tex.
The firm’s US$50,000-plus appliance categorizes and manages data, so is seen as a perfect match for Google’s ad-hoc query technology.
“It hasn’t turned into a gold mine for either of us yet,” says Bernardi. But StoredIQ is confident enough to be working on integrating the two devices.
LTech Consulting, a 10-person Hoboken, N.J., software integrator, became a Google partner because last year a client needed “a pretty intensive search capability,” said president Ed Laczynski.
After some research it chose Google’s appliance and successfully installed it. Around the same time Google launched its Enterprise Professional Program, and was invited to join.
The Google brand and the quality of the appliance were factors, he said, as was the promise the company will not offer professional services.
“We saw that as a great opportunity for a small consulting boutique firm like us to get a foothold in a professional services area (where) there’s not too many people right now.”
LTech is a Microsoft partner which focuses on .Net environments.
By contrast Compugen, a major Canadian Microsoft partner, doesn’t see much opportunity with Google.
“We don’t see it today as having pertinence in the enterprise,” said company president Harry Zarek. “I don’t think they have articulated a message that appeals to IT customers.”
On the other hand, two industry analysts say Google’s emerging collection of Web-based software, much of which is given away, could create an opportunity, or a challenge, to the channel.
Google as a services platform “has the most potential to upset the market,” said Gerard Hallaren, a Gartner securities analyst who wrote a recent report on the company. He said that it is “moving into the enterprise hard.”
Coincidentally, shortly after the report was released Google bought a hosted word processor called Writely.
“It’s not hard to imagine Google hosting Web-based applications for enterprises or small businesses, much like Intuit hosts QuickBooks,” said Hallaren.
‘Mashups’
This so-called software-as-a-service model is still just emerging. But IDC Canada software analyst David Senf foresees a vision with the convergence of the enterprise with the Web.
Google says search results by businesses using its appliances will stay behind firewalls, Senf said. But he predicts there will be what he calls “mashups” (mixing Google services and search results with other applications), “and that’s where the channel opportunity gets really fuzzy.
“There’s a big upside for ISVs, developers and resellers if they can figure out a way to lever mashups using Google’s infrastructure.”
He notes, for example, that Salesforce.com has a tool called Multiforce that partners could use to build functions on top of its platform, which could be resold.
More of that is coming, he said, although pricing hasn’t been worked out yet. “If you can figure out how to play in this pond there’s a big opportunity,” he said.
“But it’s also a big opporunity to loose your shirt.”