Getting Your App On The Exchange

Brooks Jordan over at SortAnalytics wrote a great piece today about the requirements involved in getting your App on the Exchange. Interesting to note that beginning January 2007, if you charge for your App you’ll need to have your App certified and that certification costs $5k per year. If your App is free, there is no charge. Presumably this is to keep the quality of applications high and keep spam applications out. According to Brooks the certification ensures security standards. One concern I have is that this will have a dramatic impact on the cost of applications. As a small business, there are many applications that are already priced beyond my reach and this $5k fee eventually will be passed along to customers. The other question is what impact this will have on the scale of the AppExchange, and Brooks has an excellent quote:

“The larger question about the AppExchange, of course, is if it’s not an open system like EBay (“the EBay for the business Web”), will it scale? Or will the desire to have quality apps create too much friction? I think what Salesforce.com needs to do is keep the quality and security threshold relatively high, but keep tweaking the certification process until it’s one third as complex. Then, they can drop the certification fee in favor of a small percentage of the transaction between buyer and seller (like EBay), and they’ll have a platform that’s got the goods but is flexible enough to accommodate diversity. And I think that’s what they’ll do.”

Its been a year since Salesforce launched the AppExchange, and it seems like they are at a turning point with the platform. What is the vision for the AppExchange? If Mr. Benioff truly envisions it as the “eBay for the business web”, then they must make it easy and cost effective for people to build and profit from it while also making it compelling for people to consume the applications.

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