BetterCloud,the New York based startup who launched only a few months ago with DomainWatch, a security offering for Google Apps users, is today announcing a $2.2M funding round that will see it accelerate development of Google Apps products. As part of this announcement BetterCloud is announcing a public beta of its new product FlashPanel.
FlashPanel is an enhanced management overlay for Google Apps domain administrators designed to give a higher level of granular control and visibility. FlashPanel includes;
- Domain management from one dashboard: access to domain vitals including users, groups and organizational units, as well as Google Docs quota usage and a chart profiling active, suspended and unused seats
- Granular management and shared contacts: Domain administrators can use FlashPanel for tasks like adding users to new groups or OUs, group creation, and shared contact sync with mobile devices
- End-user tools: Email signature standardization and ‘Apps Butler,’ which users enable via Google Chat, retrieves company directory contact information on-demand
- Reporting, surveillance and user on-boarding: Scheduled and on-demand scans for domain stats and email inbox monitoring
- BetterCloud Gets $2.2M to Make Google Apps Safer, Easier to Manage
BetterCloud founder David Politis wrote a recent article for Mashable in which he described the generation of young people who have, in his words, “Grown up Google”. He extrapolated this fact further to suggest that it marks the end of legacy messaging systems and called out some statistics that show a less than stellar desire for organizations and especially users to move to Office365.
While it is true that Google has the early lead in cloud office productivity, it’s too early to say that lead is insurmountable. That said, BetterCloud is firmly positioning itself as a company with a series of products that are all features of Google Apps – over time we’ll see Google themselves and other Google channel partners like CloudSherpas and Appirio, but these sorts of companies to roll the functionality into some of their own offerings.
