Salesforce, the San Francisco-based Software-as-a-Service CRM vendor, has introduced a new partner program for its AppExchange marketplace.
Called the AppExchange Partner Program, the new offering is designed to make creating extensions for Salesforce’s hosted sales, service, and other solutions more profitable and hence attractive to both full-time developers and VARs or solution providers with marketable Salesforce-based intellectual property.
“Anyone that’s building amazing technology that extends usage of our platform and that wants to offer that in a commercial fashion is welcome to join this program,” says Leyla Seka, executive vice president of the AppExchange group at Salesforce. “We see many awesome system integrators building really unique solutions on our platform that they can leverage it in a multitude of commercial ways.”
The revised program’s benefits are based on a new point-based measurement structure under which developers can raise their Trailblazer score by accumulating positive reviews and ratings, adopting the latest Salesforce technologies, and qualifying for certifications, among other activities. That system replaces an earlier scheme that focused chiefly on an ISV’s revenue figures.
“Of course, revenue is important to every partnership and it will continue to be important to ours, but there are a lot of other really critical components that we think are important as a company and that are important in partnering with us,” Seka says, adding that those other criteria empower smaller partners to compete more effectively for resources with larger peers.
“The reality is we have some great big partners that do amazing things for our customers and we’re both very successful together and we have some great really little partners that do amazing stuff for our customers,” Seka notes. “We believe the Trailblazers score will allow us to take a more holistic view across the things that we believe are important in partnership and really elevate up the companies that are doing great at that.”
To make listing software on the AppExchange more profitable—and hence appealing—to ISVs large and small, Salesforce has also lowered its cut of a developer license revenue—officially known as the percent-net-revenue, or PNR—from 25 percent to 15. The company switched from 15 to 25 percent 2 years ago, to the dismay of software startups in particular.
“The economics of 25 percent was a little tough for them,” Seka says, “so what we’re doing is creating a lower baseline PNR percentage to really allow for all types of innovation on our platform and really to welcome all different types of partners and all sizes of ISV partners back onto the platform.”
In a further bid pull more developers into its marketplace, Salesforce also plans to roll out a revamped onboarding process for newcomers to AppExchange later this year. Its goal is to shorten time to market for developers through automated, wizard-driven guides and checklists, plus APIs for connecting payment systems to Salesforce’s ordering tools.
“We want to make it as easy as possible for our ISV partners to do business with us,” Seka says.
The AppExchange Partner Program’s third core pillar is a new development environment named Salesforce DX that unifies the formerly separate Force.com and Heroku coding platforms under a common roof. Currently in beta testing, Salesforce DX is expected to enter general availability in June.
“Build where it makes sense for you to solve the customer problem as fast as possible,” Seka tells developers. “Our job is to enable you and help you get there.”
Also announced today is a new $100 million investment fund aimed at helping creators of especially promising apps get to market rapidly. The new pool of startup capital follows in the footsteps of a similar $50 million fund Salesforce launched nearly a year ago for users of its Lightning app platform.
“This platform fund is essentially us doubling down and going wider to really foster innovation inside our ecosystem and to really find intelligent and awesome new solutions that can help our customers move to the next level of whatever problem they’re trying to solve,” Seka says.
Salesforce introduced AppExchange 11 years ago. It currently contains over 3,000 applications and has powered some 4.5 million installations.
“There’s over one install a minute on the AppExchange,” Seka says.
Distributor Ingram Micro announced new development tools for contributors to its cloud marketplace 2 weeks ago.
