A new partnership has now been announced by Google’s Cloud division and MobileIron which aims to make the deployment of enterprise applications a much easier process for businesses. By building on the former company’s current Orbitera commerce platform, the two companies hope to solve at least some of the problems businesses face with regard to business software. The primary goal of Orbitera has already been to provide a single marketplace for the distribution of enterprise software, regardless of operating system or hardware platform. MobileIron is being brought in to further bolster the security of the platform, as well as its app management and analysis tools. Specifically, the companies hope to effectively create a completely new business application distribution service that is both scalable and customizable.
For clarity, the goal is not to create and provide a single dedicated marketplace for all businesses to buy and sell applications on. Instead, the new project will center around helping businesses to easily build their own marketplace in service of business customers – which will be integrated into Google’s Cloud Platform. From that marketplace, authorized customers, partners, or users can access applications specifically tied to the business, with billing, authentication, and application entitlement being handled by the platform. Businesses who take advantage of the platform will be able to group services and software into bundles, making those easier to distribute efficiently and streamlining the process of analyzing application use among customers. Moreover, they’ll be able to create custom branding for their own marketplace and customers, with complete control over who is authorized to access the store and which applications they can access. Finally, the new platform is planned to also allow for streamlined billing across all of a customer’s devices, data, and other cloud services through the generation of a single monthly invoice.
Although the two companies have several clear goals in mind for the new Orbitera platform, Google’s announcement did not mention a specific timeline for when the new platform would become available. Fortunately, there is a sign-up available at the source link below for anybody interested in receiving more information as it becomes available.