The Future: Big Corporations Become Distributors for Small Business Apps

by Anita Campbell

January 21, 2009 at 1:20 am · Filed under Information Architecture, Web 2.0

We’ve seen the future for small business developers of software apps — and it’s having the big guys distribute your app on their platform.

What Wal-Mart did for entrepreneurial inventors of new consumer products … what Amazon did for authors of new books … and what eBay did for antiques dealers and other small etailers — various companies are now doing for developers of software and media applications.

We are seeing large popular products become distribution channels for smaller “satellite” products, through an associated marketplace. These are places where small developers of products can go and more easily find customers and distribute their apps without the costs of developing market channels on their own.

Perhaps the highest profile apps distribution platform is Apple with its Apps Store.

USAToday has an article about how application developers are using the iPhone as a way to get noticed. And it’s more than just getting PR or visibility — they’re making money, too. App developers are clamoring to get in to the App Store because they get results. For instance, Pandora, the online radio service, is reported to get 40% of its new subscribers from the iPhone. And it’s all because Apple makes it easy with its Apps Store — easy for both end users and developers.

But iPhone apps are just a start.

RIM, makers of the ubiquitous BlackBerry, recently announced that it is accepting developer applications for its new Application Storefront, which will allow BlackBerry users to download software applications to their BlackBerry devices.

Google has a similar opportunity in the works for its Android Market, a marketplace of apps for its new Android phone.

And it doesn’t stop with mobile devices. No — software apps are also being distributed online through centralized venues. Of course, we’ve long had places like Tucows and Download.com, where if you had a small piece of shareware or a low-priced software app, you could distribute it.

But now ecosystems are developing, with apps designed to work with particular products such as the iPhone.

The Intuit Marketplace is one of the highest profile examples of a marketplace for SaaS software applications. It’s more than just a marketplace, but is actually a platform that helps developers cost effectively build hosted online applications. By participating in the Intuit Partner Progam, Intuit tells developers of B2B software they can “Easily build Intuit Workplace Apps and then sell them to our millions of small business customers.” Intuit goes on to say it’s … “The fastest & easiest way to build your SaaS business – without the hassle of building your own server, database, and billing infrastructure.”

Intuit allows you to use their QuickBase infrastructure to develop the application. They make it easy to integrate with the flagship Intuit product, QuickBooks. They host the application for you. You pay only for the resources you use. And they’ll even provide a platform at the Intuit Marketplace so you can sell your app to the 4 million small business customers that Intuit has.

Currently in the Intuit Marketplace Workplace Apps collection there appear to be hundreds of applications available. For more, read the review by Alex Criss of the Partner Platform and the Intuit Marketplace.

Small businesses have seen the future, and it’s about partnering with the big guys to develop, host and distribute your software application as a service.

Share:

Permalink

17 Comments »

Wow. Intuit’s business is also impressive. I love the way they help small business developers and how much they will also gain from it. Making Intuit a popular place for small business developers making the software apps and for small business customers willing to spend to buy those apps. Brilliant!

This is a very interesting trend. It has to do with the supply chain, from the producer / service provider to the customer. I think that an user friendly site and the compilation of the “long tail” of vendors and products is the winning formula. You have plenty of stuff to pick from at your fingertips.

Great review and outline of where things are headed. One of the big challenges as I see it is that before these ‘platforms’, if I was a small software vendor I built a piece a software without regard to the potential distribution platform i.e. I coded a solution in Java or PHP and I made sure it ran on IE and Mozilla and I was then sure that aside from the distribution issue if and when someone found my product they were sure to be able to use it.

Now, given these companies that encourage you to build and distribute on their platform, there is the potential to have to create entirely new versions of an application to run on a particular platform example: if I want to truly take advantage of Salesforce.com’s platform I have to code in their Apex language using Force.com tools, or if I want to run in Ituit’s platform I have to build with their tools. This is much more complex than having to ensure that an application runs in both IE7 and Mozilla because they are completely different tools.

It will be interesting to see if building a version of your product to work on a single large platform is worth the potential distribution rewards or do you just build a great product and work on getting people to find out about it. The other option is to not integrate as tightly as using the Force.com approach but just using the published API’s of the above mentioned companies to share data when needed, maintaining some level of separation.

I love how easily these apps are made available. Not only is it a convenient way to develop and market your own apps, but it makes finding and using apps quick and easy. Ed brought up some good thoughts too.

They jumped over their competiton early on by having ‘apps’ that worked with their system.

Hi Dean, Salesforce.com, Skype, even Facebook have encouraged apps that work with their system. By this kind of loose “partnering” you definitely look more attractive than your competition to business partners. It’s the old adage: WIIFM. “What’s in it for me?”

Plus, it’s more attractive to end users, who can find what they need more easily and don’t have hunt around or worry if something integrates or works with the “main” product — it’s already assured.

Another “app marketplace” with phenomenal growth is twitter.com — twitter is a forum for exchanging short messages much in the spirit of birds chirping “out in the open”. Many applications have been to make sense of the twitter chitter chatter.

In the future, I expect that the generalized (but commercially oriented) chitter chatter found at twitter will expand into other spheres and also other modes of interaction — for example: change.org is oriented towards changing something in the world (and also primarily on doing so via financial contributions).

I could imagine that similar commercial (.COM), network (.NET), organizational (.ORG) or other top-level domains will foster second-level domains as “create”, “grow”, “expand”, “exchange”, “share” (and so on) that would permit additional ways of interacting online — and then applications will be develop that will facilitate & support such kinds of interaction.

That forecast Norbert is quiet interesting. I’m beginning to think of ways how to do that or what can I do to contribute on the future.

Thanks, Mary (note that I missed a word — my brain thinks fast than my fingers can type [NOT fast ;]… so: “Many applications have been to make sense of the twitter” should read “Many applications have been created to make sense of the twitter”)

You need to know what LANGUAGE your audience speaks — not just which “natural” language (such as English, Indonesian, Malay, etc.) but also which JARGON (such as “marketing”, “sports”, “games”, etc.).

I have a large portion of the vocabulary on the Internet — and I specialize in appraising and interpreteing the valu & significance of TLDs (such as in: .TV=”television”).

If you would like me to help you, you can contact me via a contact link on any one of my domains.

[...] The Future: Big Corporations Become Distributors for Small Business Apps [...]

BTW: For those brave enough to read MORE than a full page, I recommend my “Wisdom of the Language” article — it’s about 2 years old already, but IMHO it’s still fresh (“new & improved”) today…

Hi Ed,
I completely agree with the concern over “lock-in” – It’s one of the reasons we’ve partnered with Adobe to provide a Flex framework for the Intuit Partner Platform as opposed to our own language. We want developers building and staying with IPP because of the value of the platform & marketplace not because their code isn’t portable.

The Future: Big Corporations Become Distributors for Small Business Apps | The AppGap…

I thought I would be directed to a blog of yours when I click on your name. I can’t just seem to understand the reading.biz site.

Btw, Just check out about Intuits and learned they already did offer a lot of business softwares. So those were from the developers who used Intuits platform!

Thanks for pointing that out on Intuit using Flex in the IPP that is a big benefit and I the right way to go.

Your comment

HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>