Google beefs up channel team, rolls out the carpet

Google has a message for Australian resellers. "We're open for business," Doug Farber, managing director enterprise, Google Asia Pacific, told CRN.

Google had already fostered relationships with a small number of enterprise resellers including SMS Management and Technology, Devnet and Hedloc. The vendor, which described itself as "100 percent" channel, looked to broaden its reach.

"We were a merry band of five, six maybe 10 guys running around opportunistically selling and building that channel. Now we are getting a little more scientific, a little more structured around this space," Farber said.

The cloud-software vendor has quadrupled its enterprise team with channel manager, operations and backend support, and technical account managers. It has added deal registration, opportunity management, portal partners and started using a partner relationship management module.

"Our support system has vastly expanded," Farber said. "We want people who understand and are passionate about software as a service. We are filling rooms of people willing to hear this stuff. We have to get the rubber to hit the road."

The Google channel resold three products. Its sole hardware product was a colourful search appliance known internally as "the pizza box", which brought Google's search technology inside a corporate firewall.

The search appliance competed with legacy based search applications and could search across many file formats including archive files such as Documentum. Farber said resellers enjoyed success selling into government, schools, media companies, telcos and manufacturing.

Google has also built a successful business around its mapping programs Google Maps and Google Earth. Energy Australia and resource companies used the cloud-based software to map their assets over large areas.

Google said its Google Apps productivity suite had been very well received by enterprise. "There's a lot of animosity towards the incumbent," Farber said, due in part to Microsoft's "onerous" licensing.

Farber said response to Google Apps, especially Outlook competitor Gmail, had been "astounding".

Over 2 million companies were using Google Apps, he claimed.

Google Australia was building a certification program for each of the three product sets, from selling to deployment, Farber said.