Google Apps Reseller Program - What Does It Mean For Managed Services?
Google has just launched a reseller program for their popular Google Apps service. At my managed services day job, we have already put 3 or 4 clients on Google Apps, and they have loved it. The problem has been trying to figure out how to make recurring revenue off of it, and provide extra value to our clients. We were extremely close to switching over to Microsoft's hosted Exchange offering as they had a reseller model built in right away. But the problem with the Microsoft solution is that it was so expensive, if I remember correctly it was $10 a month per user, or more than double Google's $50 per user per year.
Granted, Exchange offers better synchronization with Outlook, shared calendaring and all that fun stuff. BUT, the clients that were approaching us wondering if Google Apps was a good fit were not interested in all those enterprise level features anyways. Google Apps is, quite simply, a great fit for a large amount of small businesses out there.
From a managed services perspective, I wouldn't push it on your clients. If they start balking at the price of Exchange or Novell upgrades, then you might want to bring it up. From a pure dollars and cents view, you will probably want to keep your customers off of these services if at all possible. Making $10 per year per user on email isn't much, not when compared to doing an Exchange upgrade every few years, and all the maintenance it requires. At the same time, if it looks like your client really wants to go down the hosted email route, don't stop them. The entrance requirements for becoming an Apps reseller are low, so you might as well get it and bring in that $10 per user recurring revenue annually.
Here is the video Google released regarding the Apps Reseller program.
Rob Steenwyk
Just wanted to follow this up and let you know that the Google Apps Reseller requirements are a little bit harder than some other similar reseller programs out there. The first requirement is to have a Google Apps domain setup and link it to your reseller account, but this domain does NOT need to be a Premier account. For my company I just linked it to another domainI had setup for some side work that I do. After that, you need to link your account to a client that DOES use Premiere. The requirement is that you link your reseller account to at least 25 Google Apps Premier accounts, not 25 separate domains. Once you complete that step, Google will run a credit check on your company and get back to you within 3-4 weeks. My company is in the credit check step.
I just finished implementing Google Apps Premier at a small (35 accounts) manufacturing company. I had given them the pros and cons of both Google Apps and Microsoft Hosted Exchange, and they chose Google Apps. In my talks with them, the main concern was cost. Simply put, they thought Hosted Exchange cost too much, which is understandable considering it is more than double the cost annually.
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