Google: May We Recommend This Cloud App?

There’s a pretty simple motivation behind Google’s recent decision to endorse certain business applications — just eight out of the more than 750 existing choices found on its expansive marketplace of software built to complement Google Apps for Work.

It’s this: a growing number of small and midsize businesses apparently want to migrate their entire technology operation to cloud applications. That requires far more than email, cloud file storage, spreadsheets, collaboration, and other productivity applications, said Rahul Sood, managing director of Google Apps for Work.

“We are picking applications that people are looking for. We are picking categories that are adjacent, where integration with Google Apps is super important,” Sood told Fortune during an interview about the company’s new “Recommended for Google Apps” program revealed in early November.

The marketplace was created close to a decade ago, to help market software developers building applications that complement Google cloud services — everything from Drive to Hangouts. Few companies have time to assess the every-growing list of options thoroughly, so Google GOOG decided to pick up the slack, according to Sood.

The first eight apps to be blessed with a recommendation under Google’s new program include ProsperWorks, a simple customer relationship management system; SmartSheet, a project management service; RingCentral RNG and Switch, both cloud communications platforms; AOCDocs and Powertools, online resources for document management and workflow; and Ping Identity and Okta, which specialize in identity management technology.

All of the apps were evaluated by Google and a third-party “security auditor” for reliability and performance, according to a blog post describing the initiative. “The main benefit for [the developers] is really easy access to the largest installed base and community of cloud-committed customers,” Sood said.

As of early November, Google counted more than 2 million “paying” customers for Google Apps for Work. For perspective, it has more than 1 million active users alone on Google Drive, its cloud file-sharing and storage service. From a small software company’s point of view, the “Recommended” label offers the sort of sales and marketing visibility most startups can only dream of leveraging.

Google’s rationale for selecting certain categories or certain vendors is more mysterious.

If you look at the sales and CRM category on the Google Apps marketplace, for example, there are literally dozens of applications available — many with far more users than the roughly 51,000 that run ProsperWorks. What prompts Google to “recommend” a particular app?

While Sood pretty much dodged that question, part of the equation involves how much a given application relies on a core Google Apps for Work service and how much attention the software’s creator pays to security. “We are using different criteria to build confidence, to showcase a great experience,” he said.

The AOCDocs software, for example, has already been adopted by hundreds of companies — and more than 1.25 million users. One corporate account is Whirlpool WHR , which uses the service to manage hundreds of sensitive business documents, including human resources information. It pay for Google to talk up that sort of adoption.

Google expects more application categories to be added over time. In addition, the Google Apps for Work technical team will reevaluate its list of recommended apps on an annual basis. It should be intriguing to see how the program evolves now that VMware co-founder Diane Greene has joined Google as its new cloud strategist.

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