AppExchange Seven Years On

Enterprise Irregulars

"The AppExchange is undoubtedly a significant portion of what makes salesforce.com unique. Pre-integrated solutions dramatically reduce the cost to the customer to extend the capabilities of Salesforce and the fact that it has already gone through growing pains means it will take other providers years to mimic its capability and impact." ~Narinder Singh, co-founder and CSO, Appirio.

Nine years ago I wrote The New Garage. It was a thought piece that tried to peer into the future of Software as a Service (SaaS) and make some predictions from a business and economics perspective. Salesforce had recently started promoting its platform in the making (then called S-Force) and encouraging third parties to develop applications that complemented and extended the basic Salesforce CRM solution so there was no reason to speculate about the impact this new approach would have.

But also, the history of business and industry is a long story of better, faster and cheaper and at that moment all three were all in the driver's seat. Back office software had already demonstrated many business process improvements leveraging automation and the Internet, and I thought it was time to turn some of these techniques on software. SaaS was a good start but it had further to go, I thought...

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Salesforce.com and Model Metrics

Enterprise Irregulars

...I wondered if its announced acquisition of Model Metrics was a change in strategy. I asked Narinder Singh, co-founder at Appirio, and as he has blogged “Since early this year, Salesforce has aligned their entire company and all of their considerable marketing might around the social enterprise…..By adding Model’s mobile development and UI capabilities to their team, Salesforce will be able to make the social enterprise vision tangible for customers.”

In other words it extends Salesforce’s push on Chatter and acquisitions like Radian6.

Narinder adds “We are somewhat relieved to know they will be focused on driving the social enterprise and mobility for Salesforce (and therefore with us), instead of being our most worthy competitor.”...

Loosely coupled crowd development

Enterprise Irregulars
"Last week saw the launch of an initiative that perhaps models the shape of this impending disruptive change. Cloud integrator Appirio [disclosure: a recent client] announced CloudSpokes, which aims to bring a crowdsourced, community approach to enterprise cloud development tasks"

Myopia and Entropy – IT’s Great Escape

Enterprise Irregulars
I and my highly motivated CloudBlog production crew got a chance to interview one of the fastest growing systems integrators about this phenomenon. Glenn Weinstein is the CTO of Appirio. He and his founders all came from on premise software companies (SAP, WebMethods, Borland, etc.) and bet their careers and their dollars on the public cloud.

IBM, Red Hat adopt “VMware Pattern” for Cloud. Disruption Strategy Emerges

Enterprise Irregulars
For a cloud integration company like Appirio this stuff seems old hat at best.