A tactical move to offer some direct competition to Microsoft in the business software arena, will add partners as well as functionality to the Internet search giant's suite of word-processing tools, spreadsheet, and Web-based e-mail, as Google plans to open an online store to sell third-party software that complements its Google Apps collaboration.

Google would let customers purchase the software from its store and charge the third-party developers a commission. The revenue generated from the software sales through the new site will be shared by Google and the third-party software providers.

It's known that business software is Google's strategic expansion area - ever since it commenced the sale of enterprise business applications (almost two-and-a-half years back), the company has reported the signing up of nearly 2 million organizations, for Gmail and Google Docs.

With this proposal Google has singled out the company's IT products for business as one of several attractive businesses to complement its core online search ad business. Google's site "Solutions Marketplace" could have an extension as it still needs to have the e-commerce transaction capabilities.

Google Checkout, the self-serve ad-selling system of Google AdWords, the Android market and Google Apps itself, are few of the products for which users can sign up online. Thus, the app store could be more an evolution of the existing Solutions Marketplace site than an entirely new site built from scratch.