Salesforce: AppExchange's Popularity on the Rise

Salesforce.com (CRM) is seeing traction with its Salesforce AppExchange site among users—and it’s got the stats to prove it. So how popular is the site, and what does it mean for partners and developers? Read on for the details.

For starters, according to statistics provided to Talkin’ Cloud by Salesforce.com—a week before they go live in a Salesforce blog post, mind you—AppExchange is home to more than 1,800 partner apps. Other numbers of note:

While these numbers are cause for celebration among developers, they are also good news for partners: Apps on AppExchange are considered among users to be useful to businesses.

Part of the secret sauce is Salesforce’s commitment to partner applications, said Sara Varni, Salesforce AppExchange director of Marketing.

“We’re seeing partners trying to bring the best practices from the consumer world over to the enterprise,” she said. “We often encourage them to do so, leveraging parts of our platform like Chatter to make their application social or incorporating network effects into their application.”

Varni noted Salesforce stays with partners during each step of the AppExchange app process, including categorizing the app in AppExchange, calculating app pricing and providing ongoing insight on how an app can improve after it has gone to market.

To date, more than 1 million developers have developed more than 3 million apps on the Salesforce Platform and customers have installed more than 1.8 million apps from partners.

Salesforce recently completed its acquisition of cloud marketing platform company ExactTarget (ET), gaining the platform’s technology as well as 6,000 customers, including Coca-Cola and Nike.