Thinking about Salesforce Spring ’07

You know how it is. You arrive in a foreign city, find something to eat, head back to your hotel and do a perfunctory google for developer oriented Salesforce speak and you end up on some really interesting blog, and you spend the next hour chasing related posts. This time it was James Governor in We’ll know Apex is Real if AppExchange starts making money for partners.

James has given me some excellent material to think about-I was after all looking for some juicy questions to ask the Salesforce folk at tomorrow’s event. The sentence that excites me the most is:

AppExchange really needs to be a market, not a platform. What matters most is creating opportunities for folks to make money.

How true. I’ve been spending some time thinking about mashups, monitizing mashups, monitizing the entire web 2.0 service-oriented culture, and what I really like is AppExchange. It does really appear to be a marketplace. It is also a marketplace where I can start applying my mashup skills, albeit in a limited context (Salesforce only). But still – it’s there now and I can start selling stuff tomorrow. That’s motivation.

Other questions James makes me want to ask:

• Tell me about data virtualization and partioning with Apex
• Tell me about all the ways I can construct enterprise web services to some of my data. Web services that have throttles, controls, authorization and the like. Web services that are transactional. That I can charge for.

I’ll let you know if I get any answers.

Technorati Tags: saas, salesforce

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