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Cloud Reportby Jeffrey Schwartz, Executive Editor
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Google Partners Form Cloud Alliance
A group of seven Google partners this week formed an alliance that plans to work closely on helping customers to add different third-party business applications that run with Google Apps.
The Cloud Alliance for Google Apps claims it represents the most heavily deployed applications in the Google Apps Marketplace and appears to be looking to leverage its combined strength to jointly try to reach enterprise customers through outreach and ensuring interoperability where it makes sense.
Members of the alliance include Cloud Sherpas, Expensify, Insightly, Okta, RunMyProcess, SmartSheet and Spanning. Heading up the group is David Politis, chairman of Cloud Alliance and a vice president at Cloud Sherpas. Politis told me this is not a Cloud Sherpas effort, nor is Google involved.
"We believe there is an opportunity to improve the selection experience for end users and admins of Google Apps," Politis said. "As they go into the marketplace, it can be quite a process to evaluate, install, purchase, un-install and test different apps to figure out which ones to accept. We've taken the best of breed applications, we've created this alliance to go out and make that process easier for end users and administrators."
Each member will host a webinar starting Nov. 16 and running through March 14 on how to enhance Google Apps. Politis said over time, the group will add more members but first wanted to start out with a manageable number.
"I believe this alliance will evolve quite a bit," Politis said. "This ecosystem is still figuring out where it's going to go and it's still evolving."
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 02, 2011