Google launches reseller program for Google Apps Premier Edition, SaaS office productivity suite 18 January, 2009 By Erin Bell

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"Google Apps has reached a level of maturity where it is useful and valuable for almost any business," said Dave Girouard, president of enterprise, Google. "This program gives IT solution providers an easy way to introduce cloud computing to their service offerings, while helping more businesses make the transition to this new era of technology."

"We're seeing a real take-up now as the market is becoming more familiar with SaaS, and as the SaaS products broadly speaking are becoming more mature and as our products are becoming more mature, and that has lead to a real readiness with partners who have been clamoring to work more closely with us in order to address the needs of their clients and to expand their footprint and their expertise into a new area," said Stephen Cho, director, Google Apps channels.

According to Cho, Google is encouraging applications to the Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program from businesses around the world and companies of "all sizes and types, from the smallest IT consultants and VARs to global systems integrators and larger professional services firms and SaaS vendors -- ISPs, for example, who bundle this together with Access for their business customers."

The Google Apps Premier Edition suite of communication and collaboration tools includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Talk, and Google Video for business. Google estimates that more than 1 million businesses are currently using Google Apps, with approximately 3,000 new businesses signing up per day.

Since its launch in 2007, Google Apps has grown to include a full set of migration tools, interoperability with Outlook and BlackBerry, Google Video for Business (a kind of YouTube for companies), Video Chat, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that extend across the full suite.

"From a product perspective, the product has really matured and we find customers up and down the scale from the smallest companies to the largest multi-national corporations are really starting to integrate, adopt and take advantage of the existing suite of apps and they're looking forward to the additional features that are coming," said Cho.

Google will provide resellers with training, support, and tools for sales and marketing, as well as access to tools for integrating Google Apps into their customers' business operations. Resellers will bill their customers directly, enabling them to retain a close relationship with customers. Resellers can also bundle additional services and support with Google Apps.

"We believe strongly that all companies will adopt SaaS to one degree or another, and Google's reseller program empowers us to be experts in the cloud," said Tony Safoian, president of IT firm SADA Systems Inc. "Reselling Google Apps opens up new opportunities via new conversations we could not have had with prospective clients as little as two years ago."

The reseller program will include a partner portal; sales and technical training, and marketing materials; reseller tools for setting up business customers, provisioning end users, management and reporting, and REST-based integration APIs for directory synchronization, migration, reporting and single sign-on.

"The reseller owns the relationship with the customers. They provide the sales and the marketing of the product; they're able to resell it, they can bundle it with any other additional products and service offerings that make sense to them, and they do the activation and deployment of the customers -- getting them up and running," Cho explained. "And they do all customer billing, which enables them to extend and grow their client relationships to cross-sell and up-sell and provide additional value."

A common request from customers using the premier edition of Google Apps is for full end-user support in the form of outsourced help desk services, since Google itself only provides support to the IT administrators of the company. According to Cho, many partners are providing such services.

"We believe the most successful partners will be those who not only do reselling but who provide a full set of wraparound services and solutions, some that are project based -- implementation, integration, customization, migration activity, training and educating users -- as well as recurring services opportunities, in particular around providing full support for end-users," said Cho.

Google also announced a 50-seat cap on the Standard edition of Google Apps, which is free. As part of the new partner program, resellers in North America will receive a 20 per cent discount on each copy of Google Apps Premier Edition each year they resell the product for the lifetime of the customer. According to Cho there are recurring revenue streams around the wraparound services that they provide as well.

"We're looking to set the standard in the world's strongest SaaS product. We're also looking to set the standard in terms of the world's strongest SaaS channel program," said Cho. "The ability to resell has actually been built into the product itself; effectively it's just another app in the suite of Google Apps.

"This degree of automation enables even the smallest resellers to go out and set up order for customers and provision and manage and monitor them effectively and efficiently through the online tools."

Transactions for qualified partners will begin in March. Resellers can learn more about the program by visiting Google.com/apps/resellers.