Google Apps Marketplace: ready for prime time?

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Is Google Apps Marketplace ready for prime time or is this another example of Google’s perennial beta program?

Google Apps Marketplace opened yesterday to great fanfare. At one point I was receiving around 10 emails an hour informing me of new services being added into the platform. Naturally, the first place I looked was in the finance and accounting sections and already I see there are nine contenders (see image left) including Freshbooks and Intuit Online payroll. As of right now, FreshBooks is taking prime slot on the marketplace homepage – presumably through paid positioning.

Are you ready to take that kind of jump? Some small businesses will certainly consider it but it is not all plain sailing. According to the FreshBooks entry:

Changing existing accounts to use Google Apps for logging in is a more involved problem. As it’s early days for the Google Apps Marketplace right now, we are waiting to see how the marketplace operates to see if there are any glitches before exposing our existing customers to any risks. We wouldn’t want to inadvertently lock our own customers out of their own accounts – as we are dealing with the cashflow of businesses we are naturally inclined to be conservative. We’ll keep you updated on this integration as it evolves.

There are other warnings as well. On the myERP.com comments page:

Not as customisable as you would think, especially since this is primarily US focused. I don’t see anyone taking advantage of the subscription product, when they could get better value from an open source product such as openbravo. I would love to see them offer more value as well as a more rounded product, other than that they have integrated email, contacts, etc. quite well into google apps. I would keep an eye on this product, maybe they’ll take it to the level that it should be at.

I’m led to understand that NetSuite will be coming to the party but as yet there is no defined timeline for that integration.

One real surprise is that Salesforce.com is missing from the line up. Run this maketplace search and what do you find? Deployment services. That’s a strange omission.

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Tagged as: apps, beta program, cloud applications, computing, fanfares, google, googles, human-computer interaction, hypertext, marketplace, mobile payment, naturally, primed, ready, world wide web