Google unveiled their Google Apps Reseller program yesterday.  What does it mean?  In a nutshell, Google is looking to get more business user traction for their SaaS business office productivity offerings – specifically: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Sites and their security services for on-premise email servers. (I’d include Google Video on that list, but the word on the street is that Google is planning to shut down Google Video).

In order to achieve that, Google wants to hire you to become a reseller of their business applications, and set up small and medium businesses with Google’s SaaS offerings.  The premise is simple and brilliant, and it’s the type of thing that Microsoft has been doing for years with their Microsoft Certified Service Professional program.

Sounds great, so what’s the catch?

The one “gotcha” part of it is that it’s up to you to bill the customer for your services and time, and Google in turn will bill you directly.  But the bonus for you as a reseller is that you can start building a value-add proposition for customers: they trust you to convert them to a lower-cost SaaS offering (or deploy productivity applications in their environment for the first time), and in turn the company continues working with you as a trusted IT services vendor and architect.

Perhaps one possible criticism of Google’s plan to create a reseller program: it seems to be violating one of the principles of the evolving SaaS market.  Specifically, SaaS offerings should be so simple and easy to use that any employee of a company with little to no IT experience should be able to purchase any software-as-a-service direct from a vendor’s website and start using the product immediately.  This perhaps shows a sign of weakness in how easy it is at the moment for companies to transition to Google as a SaaS provider.  But, that criticism aside, Google’s reseller program seems to be a smart move.

Google plans to weed out the flakey service providers by testing your IT skills before authorizing you to be a part of their reseller program.  It’s then up to you to go out and drum up business, and if you aren’t signing up clients, it’s no loss to Google.  Overall it seems like a win-win for Google: they are effectively building an extremely cost efficient sales force (which is almost free to them, aside from the training materials and reseller testing), and these resellers don’t actually make any money from Google.  It’s almost like all of those power eBay sellers who make a living selling their products on eBay.

Filed under: Enterprise Web, Google, SaaS