Early enterprise adopters of Google Apps Premium Edition will face a choice: Get their IT departments to customize the product to meet their needs, or work with third parties who hope to ride the search firm’s coattails.Early enterprise adopters of Google Apps Premium Edition will face a choice: Get their IT departments to customize the product to meet their needs, or work with third parties who hope to ride the search firm’s coattails.
That’s the opportunity open to solution providers with the search company’s new paid subscription productivity tools (US$50 a year per user), announced last month.
The suite includes Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar and Gmail, among other programs.
While free versions of the Google applications have been supported by online ads, the subscription to the enterprise version comes ad-free with additional customer support.
It also includes access to application programming interfaces (APIs) for the programs that can be used to integrate them with other systems.
A customer might want to link the Google Talk instant messaging software, for example, with a unified communications suite. The APIs allow IT departments to go under the hood of Google Apps and handle the mechanics of that by themselves.
“The term ‘out of the box’ doesn’t really apply to a hosted service, but we believe the product is simple yet powerful enough that many users can use it straight out of the gate,” said Kevin Smith, head of Google’s enterprise partnerships.
“In the enterprise, however, there are organizations with additional requirements. The APIs allow them to create an extension or enhancements to the product.”The other option is to work with companies that have already created versions of their products that will work directly with Google Apps. These include Avaya, which is offering a unified communications-Google Talk integration, and Postini, which is offering an e-mail gateway and compliance software to work with Gmail.
Vancouver-based Sxip Identity said its Sxip Access product could handle identity management, including single sign-on capabilities, the ability to create, modify or revoke user access to Google applications and integration with corporate directories. Sxip has had a similar arrangement with hosted CRM provider Salesforce.com since 2005.
“It lets them launch very, very quickly,” said Michael DeSandoli, Sxip’s vice-president of operations. “For a lot of companies, it’s not worth the hassle to take the APIs and do it themselves.”
Although Google has set up relationships with a number of partners, Smith said customers of Apps Premium Edition are also free to use the APIs as they see fit.
Depends on savings
Gerry Gable, an analyst with the Burton Group in Park City, Utah, said the decision to tweak internally or hire a solution provider will depend on how much enterprises can save in licensing or administration costs.
Smith said Google is expecting a “measured conversion” from other office software. This could include keeping the 20 per cent of an organization’s “power users” on an existing platform and moving the rest to Google, or offering the Google apps to contract and seasonal workers. “I don’t think we have the expectation that this is going to replace every system out there.”