The second day of AppDIrect’s digital economy summit in Montréal sees AppDirect go from selling Google apps to a deep integration with the Google Cloud Platform that significantly expands partner opportunities.
AppDirect, which has come north of the border for the first time to hold their Engage Digital Economy event in Canada, at the Fairmont Queen Victoria in Montréal, is making a pair of major announcements today. The company is announcing the expansion of their Google relationship to include a tight integration with the Google Cloud Platform [GCP], as well as the ability of AppDIrect, for the first time, to deliver their core services there. AppDirect is also announcing the launch of Add-On Marketplace, a net-new AI-powered add-on Store that features a large roster of complementary extensions.
San Francisco-based AppDirect makes an end-to-end cloud commerce platform that customers use to build their own marketplaces in the digital economy. The AppDirect ecosystem connects channels, developers, and customers, to simplify the digital supply chain.
One of the announcements is the launch of Add-On Marketplace, an add-on Store that features a large roster of complementary extensions that customers had commonly been adding to their platforms
“This is a brand-new platform that reflects the fact that while we have always been a marketplace provider, this is for a new category of providers,” said Dan Saks, AppDirect’s co-founder, President and co-CEO. “We have hundreds of customers that have their own marketplaces, but we have found there were common things they were using that were extensions to our platforms – like search tools, accounting tools and payment gateways. These are all being launched with the Add-on Marketplace. This is a showcase of services that work well with our platform customers.”
At the launch, over 40 of these services are on the Add-On Store, which include connectors to leading SaaS solutions, such as CRM, finance and accounting and marketing automation. Two of these partners are being highlighted at the launch. They are G2 and Coveo.
“We have hundreds of partners that have been integrated, but we are launching with a few marquee partners,” Saks said. “We collaborated with them to create this experience, and embedded them into our flows.”
The other announcement being made at Engage today involves AppDirect’s multi-faceted expansion of its relationship with Google.
“Google is a long-time partner, and until now, our focus has been on partnering to resell Google apps,” Saks said. “We have now expanded that into a special relationship to resell the Google Cloud Platform and Google Compute. So our customers can now resell the whole suite of GCP mingled with their own products on services on our platform, because we have made a deep integration with GCP. We now enable partners to resell GCP, and to deploy their whole platform onto Google.”
The GCP relationship is particularly significant because GCP, like AppDirect, has an advanced position in Kubernetes. Google Cloud’s fully managed Kubernetes infrastructure let AppDirect engineering teams scale out and easily port their workloads across multiple cloud environments, while reducing system administration work and infrastructure costs, and improving platform stability and network performance.
“We are really excited to offer this suite to our customer base,” Saks said. “For VARs and MSPs in Canada, this is a great way to have access to the Google suite.”
