SD Times Analyst Column by Jason English
When multiple buyers and sellers trade goods and services in a marketplace, participants benefit from efficiencies of scale, as their specializations of supply come together to meet customer demand.
In enterprise software marketplaces, each participant vendor contributes specialized expertise, functionality, and scale that are essential to building a complete solution for end users—assuming of course, that no single monolithic vendor would as efficiently meet customer needs.
Before software marketplaces, end users would buy software built specifically for their own vertical, such as ‘healthcare clinic management’ or ‘point of sale terminal system’ — or hire a consultant to customize a bespoke solution, since most enterprises didn’t have a deep enough development bench to do it themselves.
Development partners are precious
Consumer software marketplaces are well known, because they live on our smartphones: Apple App Store and Google Play have the markets cornered for their OS users.
These closed economies hit app developers with a 30 percent commission on each transaction, whether for purchasing the app, or even in-app transactions such as game tokens and add-ons. Developers who don’t want to pay the toll simply won’t have their apps listed.
Needless to say, publishers don’t like the arrangement. Epic Games vs. Apple are still in court today after the popular Fortnite game got kicked off the App Store for having its own internal payment system. European Union regulators are now looking at breaking up such monopolies.
In an enterprise software marketplace, application partners are highly valued, because no vendor’s system is an island unto itself. Encouraging a developer ecosystem creates more choices for end customers, who need to add new functionality that integrates with existing systems…
Read the SD Times Analyst Corner column here: https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/do-we-need-enterprise-software-marketplaces/
