Celebrating our growing partner community at our second annual Global Partner Summit

Posted by Prajesh Parekh, Google Apps Partner Marketing

Editor's note: This week we’re featuring news, stories and updates about our vibrant partner community as we host more than 700 partners for our second annual Global Partner Summit. Keep an eye on this blog and our Google+ page and visit our program site for more information on the Google Apps Reseller program. 

Millions of businesses around the world—from scrappy startups to large enterprises—rely on Google’s solutions for work. And many of them are supported by a community of partners, including more than 10,000 Google Apps Resellers globally, who help businesses set up and get more out of the Apps productivity suite.

We’ve seen our partner program grow up quite a bit since it was launched in 2009. But it’s not just growing in size — our community has gotten increasingly diverse, with IT providers from a variety of backgrounds and specialties joining us in the last few years. New partners include well-established companies, like CDW and SHI, who have provided IT solutions to customers since before tools like Hangouts or Drive ever existed. Wix and Weebly, two of the most popular website builders for businesses, also recently integrated with Google Apps after seeing the benefits it provided their own customers. These partners, like UK-based Grove Group, are driven to give their clients IT solutions that drive a better way of working.

This week, we’re hosting our second annual Global Partner Summit in San Francisco to celebrate the contributions of partners across Google Apps, Enterprise Search, Chrome, Cloud Platform and Maps for Business. The three-day summit brings together more than 700 partners to collaborate on business plans, share best practices, and engage with product experts. At the end of the week, we hope our partners will leave energized with fresh ideas for how to better help their customers.