Is there nothing safe from the grips of Google (News - Alert)? The search giant seems hardly content with controlling our navigation through the Internet and insists on delving into other areas to increase their slice of the pie. While for some, this could be promising — others see it as too much.

 

The latest out of Google is the launch of its Solutions Marketplace. This new venture goes beyond offering applications and service appliances and offers a listing site for third-party add-on products to Google Apps. 

 

According to Scott McMullan, Google Apps partner lead for Google Enterprise, the company realized a little over a year ago that so many Google-related solutions being released by third parties failed to keep up with demand and industry trends. To provide customers with a better alternative, Google created the Enterprise Solutions Gallery.

 

Designed to be a simple site, it connects the growing Google Enterprise customer base with products and professional services from Google’s expanding developer and partner ecosystem.

 

The Enterprise Solutions Gallery is designed to allow software developers to post their applications in a catalog for business customers to browse. Google positions the site as a place for customers of communications and collaboration products like Google Apps and Enterprise search to be connected with third parties that sell complementary products and services. The company expects that it will grow to fit the needs of its expanding base of customers.

 

To appeal to users, the Marketplace offers such capabilities as search, browse and end-user ratings to make it easy to locate and purchase from a qualified vendor. For developers and partners, it is easy to create information-rich vendor and product listings to reach new customers and effectively grow sales.

 

While it is positioned as providing more benefit to the customer, the move to launch this Enterprise is more of a bid to find more customers for Google Apps through the encouragement of third-party product development and sales, not unlike Microsoft’s (News - Alert) focus on building an ecosystem of third-party add-ons around the Office.

 

While Google’s Enterprise Solutions Gallery is said to parallel the Saleforce.com AppExchange, Google isn’t expected to host other companies’ solutions and applications like the AppExchange platform. Rumors abound that Google and Salesforce will be announcing a partnership on Monday that will allow Salesforce to resell Google Apps.

 

According to Tech Crunch, the Google Enterprise offerings appear to be pretty thin. The site offers syncing tools, identity management offerings, add-on gadgets and integration with other enterprise apps. What appears to be lacking is an economic model that would motivate developers to build on top of Google’s Enterprise apps. Changes and innovations are likely coming as Google always hates to be left out in the cold.

 

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