Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program has reached another milestone – over 2,000 global resellers, the company announced in the Official Google Enterprise Blog this week. Google was quick to point out that it has doubled its number in the last eight months and reached the number less than two years after the program’s launch.
In addition, Google announced the addition of eight new integrated apps to the Google Apps Marketplace, one of which was created by Google Apps reseller SADA Systems. Other new apps include ones for accounting, scheduling and workflow management, among other functions.
The announcements come after a year of growing momentum for Google Apps and resellers, with Google prominently promoting customer wins and reseller gains as more customers talk about the cloud and move some functions to the cloud.
“During the past year we’ve highlighted a number of customer success stories where resellers such as Dito, LTech, Sheepdog, and Cloud Sherpas led complex customer deployments,” Jeff Ragusa posted in the Official Google Enterprise Blog. “These resellers, and many others, have put together growing businesses by focusing primarily on Google Apps and other cloud-based applications.”
Indeed, Cloud Sherpas has told Channel Insider that the business was founded with the cloud in mind and Google as a partner. But its founders got their channel chops in the traditional IT solution provider business. The move by those channel veterans and others to Google provided some credence to Google’s efforts to make a play for the reseller and business market.
“But that’s not all,” wrote Ragusa. “We’ve also gained awareness and adoption within mainstream IT channel communities. This includes value added resellers, managed service providers, web developers, web hosting companies, Internet service providers, and system integrators, all of whom have established businesses with existing client bases and have expanded their business by offering Google Apps.”
Ragusa said the company has seen strong adoption among MSPs because their business model is more similar to cloud offering business models. Other strong adoption has come from web development, design and hosting companies.
And Google isn’t done, he said.
“While we are excited to have more than 2,000 resellers in our program, we anticipate further enhancing the program, the Google Apps suite, and the Google Apps Marketplace, to help our resellers grow their business with both new and existing customers,” Ragusa wrote.
Cloud Computing 
