Seven Google channel partners unite to form the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps-- pooling resources to push applications complementing Google Apps to enterprise customers.
The 7 vendors-- Cloud Sherpas, Expensify, Insightly, Okta, RunMyProcess, SmartSheet and Spanning-- already sell software on the Google Apps Marketplace web store, with offerings covering 7 different markets, including IT administration, CRM, security, expense management and project collaboration.
The Alliance members hope to beat the competition by integrating their applications with both each other and the Google suite of cloud-based apps such as Gmail (creating a seamless Google Apps ecosystem), as well as offering free webinars and white papers.
The group is still in discussion over joint pricing models and software packages, and will open applications for additional members by early 2012.