Bringing people together one appliance at a time

We recognize the need to leverage the vertical and technical expertise of 3rd parties in extending the reach of search deeper into corporate networks. As a result the Google Enterprise Professional partner program has grown tremendously since its inception. Its a no brainer for the partner as they get to market and sell value added services and solutions they've integrated with the Google Search Appliance. And Google gets to provide its users with great search access to a broader set of enterprise information. Win-win.

Less brouhaha, however, is made of a more subtle phenomena that we're starting to notice. For our partners, adding the power of a Google Search Appliance to a solution or product can provide fast and relevant search, but it can also uncover new challenges and customer requirements as the scope of their customer relationship expands. This can lead to new opportunities where the partner can certainly choose to increase their footprint. In many cases, however, this results in our partners talking to each other and we're seeing them leverage each other's services and form complementary relationships where they can go in together and provide a more complete interdependent solution for their collective customers. There's the portal solution provider who seeks help from a security services firm to deal with new access control requirements on previously unsearchable restricted document stores. And the professional services firm who, while deploying a custom user interface for a search appliance, joins forces with a software vendor who's created an appliance connector for the customer's legacy system. There's the systems integrator who cooperates with the business intelligence vendor to help their customer realize the benefits of a single interface for information access and decision making.

In many cases the Google Search Appliance provides the interface that brings together disparate systems and business applications that would never have otherwise worked together. Now we're bringing together partner solution providers, application vendors, and integrators who would never have otherwise worked together. We're happy to make the world a more cooperative place, and its a nice side effect that this teamwork ultimately results in an improved user experience.