On Wednesday, in an effort to help small businesses in Canada, Rogers launched the Rogers Business App Market.
The marketplace is designed to help small businesses in Canada purchase, manage, and get tech support for business applications such as email, payroll, accounting, and scheduling. Rogers Business App Market will be powered by AppDirect, a Canadian-founded ecommerce service based in San Francisco.
“Many of our customers today are stretched thin, having to spend hours of time managing business applications. We want to make it simple and easy to use business applications.”
“Many of our customers today are stretched thin, having to spend hours of time managing business applications. We want to make it simple and easy to use business applications,” said Craig Bentley, a senior vice president of small enterprise at Rogers. “Our goal is to provide access to a variety of apps that small businesses can easily use to run their businesses more efficiently.”
The marketplace currently has two application services available: Google Apps for Work and Microsoft Office 365.
“Google’s collaboration capabilities are what businesses are asking for in order to work the way their employees want to work,” said James Lambe, the country manage of Google for Work Canada. “Working with Rogers, we are able to provide these solutions to more Canadian clients easily. We’re excited to bring Google Innovation and scale to more Canadian small businesses through this partnership.”
In addition to the apps, small businesses will have access to ongoing tech support and the day-to-day software administration of their applications. The marketplace will also allow customers to buy and pay for applications on the same bill they use to pay for other Rogers services. The Rogers account tie-in will allow users to access all of their cloud services with a single log-in and password.
Rogers says the new marketplace will make managing applications simpler and more efficient. The company plans to make more productivity applications available in coming months.