Google’s Orbitera ecommerce unit has teamed up with MobileIron in a partnership designed to give enterprises a more secure way to buy and deploy Software-as-a-Service apps in the cloud.
Under the effort the two companies are collaborating on a new cloud service that will combine Orbitera’s commerce platform with MobileIron’s cloud security and mobile app distribution capabilities.
The service is designed to address the needs of organizations that deploy numerous cloud applications. It gives them a way to securely find, buy, distribute and manage those services from multiple vendors and across multiple platforms, the two companies said in separate announcements Jan 30.
“By combining MobileIron’s security and enterprise mobility management tools with Orbitera, we’re creating one place to deploy, secure, manage and analyze business applications,” said Marcin Kurc, head of Google Cloud’s commerce platform and Brian Singer, a product manager in a Jan. 30 blog.
Enterprises can use the platform to securely buy distribute mobile apps across the organization. For resellers, OEMs and software vendors, the platform offers a marketplace for procuring and delivering mobile applications and services to customers across multiple operating systems and devices.
“Our work with Google Cloud will look at ways we can help operators sell the way they want to sell and help CIOs to buy the way they want to buy,” said Simon Biddiscombe, CEO of MobileIron in a separate statement.
Orbitera and MobileIron listed several specific capabilities that they are working on enabling through the new platform. One of them is customized bundling, a feature that will let those selling software and services through the new platform to create customized bundles for specific customer segments. Also planned is a consolidated billing feature that will enable enterprises to get one monthly invoice for everything they use across all devices and third-party cloud services.
A planned secure access feature will ensure that only trusted users and devices have access to applications and services available through the new platform while a usage analysis feature will give enterprises a way to monitor app usage in the cloud, the two companies said.
Google’s cloud platform group acquired Orbitera in August 2016 in a bid to make it easier for enterprises to buy software services in the cloud and for service providers and ISVs to sell it to them. The Orbitera platform automates many of the processes involved in procuring software as a service, including billing, packaging and usage monitoring.
Amazon Web Services Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource offer enterprises a similar marketplace to find, test and buy software as a service and for ISVs and others to sell the software to them. In concept at least the marketplaces are similar to online stores for mobile apps that allow users to securely acquire mobile applications.
