On Wednesday, Google reignited its lead in the competition against Microsoft by recruiting IT resellers to market its Web-based applications to business clients.

Google will sell a package of e-mail, word processing and other office applications to third-party software resellers at a 20 percent discount in the United States.

Dave Girouard, the head of Google’s business software division, said it would be up to the participating merchants whether the savings are passed along to their corporate customers.

Google Apps shares many similarities to Microsoft’s top-selling Office package. Yet Apps is completely Web-based and is part of Google’s software-as-a-service plan.

The delivery method, dubbed “cloud computing,” is a move away from the standard practice of installing programs directly on individual computers owned by the company that needs the applications to help run its business.

Google has sold exclusively to business users over the Web since launching Google Apps in 2007, but the move to work with third parties is necessary if Google hopes to compete seriously with Microsoft or IBM.

“We feel that Google has had limited success in winning customers with a singular sales channel,” said Tiffani Bova, an analyst at Gartner Research. She estimates Google has only some 200,000 Premier customers.

The natural transition into business software is part of Google?s plan to lure some corporate customers away from rival Microsoft, whose office software products make up a significant amount of the company?s profits.

But Google is a long way from hurting Microsoft, according to Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research.

“We’ve seen in the applications space that Google is a strong email competitor, but so far it is only a complement to Office — not yet a replacement,” she said.

Meanwhile, Google is hoping that cloud computing can help lessen its dependence on online advertising, which accounts for about 97 percent of its more than $20 billion in annual revenue.

IT resellers typically sell services such as Web hosting, setting up servers and backing up data, as well as software to hundreds of thousands of end user businesses of all sizes.

Girouard believes there is a strong chance for those types of companies to get into the cloud computing revolution.

Gartner Research estimates that Microsoft currently sells more than 95 percent of its software through more than 440,000 third party resellers, and intends to spend around $3 billion on managing those sales channels in 2009.

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