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Salesforce.com was building an app store before the iPhone even existed. Today, however, the company needs to make the six-year-old AppExchange iPhone friendly.
This is the job of Mike Rosenbaum, senior VP of AppExchange Platform Operations at Salesforce.com. And it’s a tough one for this former submarine officer in the U.S. Navy.
Rosenbaum gave us the lowdown on AppExchange.
- It hosts over 1,300 apps
- These have been installed over 1 million times
- AppExchange is growing at 50% year over year
- It includes apps from over 2,000 Salesforce.com partners.
And for all that, Salesforce.com doesn’t really make a whole lot of money on it directly, Rosenbaum says.
It began as a way to make Salesforce.com more valuable and more sticky to customers. Its primary purpose was to get customers to buy bigger contracts with Salesforce. But this was before Apple expected developers to fork over a share of income.
“We have been slowly migrating the program towards more of a rev-share model,” he says. “We have some AppExchange partners who have rev-share agreements, similar to Apple with its taking 30%.”
But not all of them, particularly the ones that have been part of Salesforce’s app store for years. Even though AppExchange is something of a loss leader today, Salesforce must invest big into it. Most of those 1,300 apps are going mobile and those mobile versions are being posted on Apple’s App Store, or Android Marketplace — fees and all.
So late last month, Salesforce.com opened the doors on its own Mobile Marketplace. And to hear Rosenbaum tell it, he’s not pressuring partners into some draconian new revenue sharing contract to be part of that store either. “We aren’t forcing anyone.”
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Article source: SAI http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/RB68Fj1Ksbg/this-guy-is-trying-to-build-a-friendlier-app-store-than-apple-2011-12