The blog post (Google doesn’t do press releases) can be found here, time to dissect in in our customary style:.
G Suite is designed to help you do your best work, whether that’s through real-time collaboration that brings your teams together, or machine intelligence that expedites everyday tasks via automation. We understand, however, that your company has unique needs around processes and workflows that G Suite alone can’t solve for. We also understand that your employees rely on many third-party apps for things like customer relationship management, support, and project management to get their job done. As a result, we’re announcing two new ways to customize and extend your G Suite Platform today: App Maker, a new low-code developer tool for building custom enterprise applications, and the addition of 7 new partners to our “Recommended for G Suite” 3rd party partner program.MyPOV – Good intro on the challenge that no software package will ever address all the enterprise automation needs.
Introducing App Maker, a new way to build powerful apps for your business. App Maker is a low-code, application development tool that lets you quickly build and deploy custom apps tailored to your organization’s needs. So whether you’re looking for better ways to onboard new team members, staff projects, or approve employee travel requests, App Maker helps you build an app for these use cases in literally days instead of months.MyPOV – Good summary of what App Maker does – fill the need for speed to build specific apps that solve a pain point for an enterprise.
● Go from idea to app, fast:MyPOV – Cloud based, drag and drop, point and click are all key elements of a low code environment, using commonly knows mechanism to get usage and adoption up quickly for a new product. Good to see standard based support. And the uptake of Google’s UI framework makes the apps look good, which matters also for low code apps.
It’s easy for IT or even citizen developers (including analysts and system administrators) to quickly iterate from a prototype all the way to deployed app with App Maker. It offers a powerful cloud-based IDE that features built-in templates, a drag-and-drop UI, and point-and-click data modeling to accelerate your app development efforts. App Maker also embraces open standards like HTML, CSS, Javascript and Google’s material design visual framework, so your developers can create beautiful apps quickly, in a development environment that leverages their existing skills and knowledge.
● Build integrated, tailor-made solutions for every need:
App Maker lets you build a range of applications customized to meet the needs of your organization and connects to a wide range of data sources and APIs. This unique flexibility starts with built-in support for G Suite products as well as popular services such as Maps, Contacts, Groups and more. You can also leverage other Google Cloud services such as the Directory API and Prediction API, or third-party APIs, to create richer, more intelligent application experiences.
MyPOV – No surprise – many of the Google capabilities are exposed to App Maker developers, something to be expected, and key to make these applications integrated and powerful from the get go.
● Focus on delivery, not infrastructure:MyPOV – Good to see that IT is involved… the first wave of end user / citizen developer apps (think spreadsheets) often flew under the cover contributing to the phenomena of shadow IT. Integrating App Maker with the needs of the IT side is a key move for successful enterprise adoption.
App Maker is built on the same secure and trusted infrastructure as G Suite. Developers can safely deploy custom apps in the cloud without worrying about servers, capacity planning, infrastructure security and monitoring that would otherwise require internal support from IT. IT can also manage these custom apps in the same way that they manage G Suite apps like Gmail, Drive, and Docs — with zero click install and administration.
Over the past few months, we’ve previewed App Maker with a handful of large G Suite customers and many have successfully built and deployed applications to their organizations already. We’re also working with the following consulting partners to help deliver solutions to our joint customers: Appsbroker, gPartners, G-Workplace, Ignite Synergy, Maven Wave, PwC, SADA Systems, and Tempus Nova. […]
MyPOV – Always good to work with customers and good to see them mentioned here.
If you’re interested in trying out App Maker, it’s available today through our Early Adopter Program for G Suite Business customers. Apply for the EAP here.
MyPOV – Good to see App Maker is announced and available to explore with an EAP. Always good to see immediate availability for evaluation at announcement.
Announcing new apps for the ‘Recommended for G Suite’ program While G Suite helps your teams communicate and collaborate more easily, we understand that you also rely on other apps to manage line of business functions like sales, marketing, or operations. We want to make it easy for you to integrate these experiences with G Suite, and that’s why we introduced the Recommended for G Suite program last year. The program hand-selects market leading applications, built by independent software vendors (ISV), in various categories including project management, customer support, finance and accounting. Today, we’re adding seven new apps to the program that can help your organizations and teams be more productive. In addition to being innovative and working well with G Suite, we selected these apps because we believe they solve key problems where deeper integration and direct support with G Suite enables our joint customers to be more successful. Each application also goes through rigorous security testing and quality measures to qualify for the Recommended Partner program.
MyPOV – Always good to see partner programs to add value.
Our new Recommended Partners include
● Asana for project & process management
● DocuSign for eSignature
● Freshdesk for customer support
● LumApps for corporate & social portal
● Virtru for encryption
● Xero and Zoho Invoice for finance & accounting
MyPOV – Good to see a list of partners at launch of a new product – adding immediate value and validation to the offering. More importantly it solves the silo cross integration that many enterprises struggle with.
Overall MyPOV
Addressing the lack of developers and the need for enterprises to become more agile with software is a good need to address, so it’s good to see Google launching its product for low code developer with AppMaker. Combining G Suite with custom code and partner apps can deliver a substantial number of use cases enterprise are striving for. So, a good move by Google.On the concern side – these frameworks need to be open – even for alternative products, as enterprises use a mix of solutions. For G Suite it means opening to e.g. Microsoft Office. But it is early days and you need to crawl before you can walk, so nothing to expect from a version 1 that Google has launched this week.
We will be watching the Low Code / No Code area going forward – stay tuned.
More about Google:
- First Take - Google enters enterprise software space with Google Jobs API - read here
- Event Report - Google I/O 2016 - Android N soon, Google assistant sooner and VR / AR later - read here
- First Take - Google Google I/O 2016 - Day #1 Keynote - Enterprise Takeaways - read here
- Event Preview - Google's Google I/O 2016 - read here
- Event Report – Google Google Cloud Platform Next – Key Offerings for (some of) the enterprise - read here
- First Take - Google Cloud Platform - Takeaways Day #1 Keynote - read here
- News Analysis - Google launches Cloud Dataproc - read here
- Musings - Google re-organizes - will it be about Alpha or Alphabet Soup? Read here
- Event Report - Google I/O - Google wants developers to first & foremost build more Android apps - read here
- First Take - Google I/O Day #1 Keynote - it is all about Android - read here
- News Analysis - Google does it again (lower prices for Google Cloud Platform), enterprises take notice - read here
- News Analyse - Google I/O Takeaways Value Propositions for the enterprise - read here
- Google gets serious about the cloud and it is different - read here
- A tale of two clouds - Google and HP - read here
- Why Google acquired Talaria - efficiency matters - read here