Saturday, March 5, 2011

ERP App Store - The Salesforce.com story

I had mooted the idea of having an app store for PeopleSoft modeled in the lines of the apple app store. Questions were raised whether this is a practical idea and how customers would evaluate third party products and plug in applications to their existing PeopleSoft installations. Valid questions all. But, it turns out that we already have a perfect and successful example of an enterprise app store, that run by salesforce.com. You can find the details here - http://appexchange.salesforce.com/home
This is a working model from which one can take a lot of ideas. As I had mentioned in my earlier post, they have used web2.0 features like community rating and all applications come with details on live as well as offline support.
Let me re-emphasize my underlying conviction about this idea - customers badly need innovative, productivity enhancing, pre-built tools to aid their existing PeopleSoft installations. There is a real need for this (there are very few companies like Grey Sparling, SmartERP etc. who have exploited this need and I am sure that they are doing extremely well! Succeed Consultancy in the UK is another organization I have seen having some innovative tools, but not sure if they have commercialized any of them). Such an eco-system of the product and independent developers is required for products to grow and offer exceptional features to customers. I really hope that some company that has the resources to make this happen would take up this idea and make it a reality!

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