Who is building the enterprise app store?
While I know most of the current tools in the enterprise 2.0 (enteprise SaaS) space, I still find myself frequently Googling to find solutions and reviews: should I use MailChimp or Constant Contact? Yammer or SocialCast? SurveyMonkey or Survey.io? What’s better to use as an extranet: Drop.io or Box.net?
Marketplaces and app stores clearly has strong business models as they play gatekeeper and help facilitate standardized experiences, onboarding and data workflows. Monetizing marketplaces is straightforward and yet very few attempts at building an enterprise marketplace or app store have succeeded (read what OneForty tried to do here).
Salesforce has had breakout success bu turning itself into a true platform: its Force.com platform has an extremely active developer base who Salesforce incentives. Yes, all the major enterprises could have their own marketplaces but I tend to think this is not the best solution. Someone who can emerge to unify data across these system stands to reap major rewards. Of course, getting the critical mass to do will not be easy.
As more businesses embrace social business design principles – that is collaboration within the enterprise being a central design tenant, the ability find and evaluate new solutions will be critical. Eventually someone will become the data and router in this world.
Update: It’s 2018 and I still fill like a true enteprise app store is up for grabs; G2Crowd may be the closest we have seen. Arguably customer development platforms (CDPs) like Segment and mParticle seem to have become the de facto data routers.