A Half-Century of Google Channel Apps

Google reached a bit of a milestone recently–50 channel partners building applications and services on its enterprise search solutions.

The channel came to Google in September 2005, when the software giant sought out the aid of partners in bringing its search technology behind the corporate firewall.

Twelve initial VARs and ISVs began developing solutions designed to deliver Google’s ability to index and retrieve unstructured information (i.e., Word, Excel, e-mail) by keyword from a customer’s back end and improve the ability to store and manage those records.

Some have come and gone since, but the number of Google Enterprise Professional Partners building applications on Google now stands 50 strong.

Some are familiar names, like BearingPoint, which does custom enterprise integrations, and Information Builders, which tied it to its BI reporting apps.

Some of the neater stuff is coming from companies you may not know, like Yakabod, which built a solution using Google’s search engine technology with Yakabod’s on top, to allow groups to share work product (word documents, spreadsheets, reports, etc.) as well as their thoughts (in the form of blogs) on a secure Web-based application. The Google engine delivers relevant searches of that work product.

Nineteen firms have already added OneBox Plugins, in which keywords entered in a single query (“one box”) can be set to return searches from several enterprise sources, such as CRM, ERP and storage archives, similar to the manner in which one Google entry returns news, images and video results.