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Rise of the Enterprise App Store as a New Revenue Source for IT Vendors

Unified Communications Featured Article

Rise of the Enterprise App Store as a New Revenue Source for IT Vendors

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June 08, 2011

By Mark Sochan, CEO, Partnerpedia.com


It’s no secret that the tablet market is exploding and the application revolution is here. With the magnificent opportunities this provides it also has ushered in new challenges for technology and telecommunications vendors of all walks.


Establishing an enterprise app store for business tablets, slates, and smartphones will soon be a requirement for an entirely new revenue source. But is your firm ready to embrace these new opportunities and challenges? 

The enterprise app store and its ecosystem of value-added solutions partners, including developers, value-added resellers, independent software vendors and systems integrators, are going to disrupt existing technology business models. Executives should ensure that its potential is being seriously evaluated inside their organizations.

Pioneered by Apple (News - Alert), the app store concept was essentially driven by the consumerization of IT (information Technology): users demanding a convenient means of finding and acquiring the applications they wish to download. Unlike a consumer-focused app store, the enterprise app store caters to employees and partner ecosystems by combining business-to-business (B2B) commerce and application management for the IT department.

Recently, Michele Pelino, a principal analyst at Forrester Research (News - Alert), stated three of the top priorities enterprises are focused on today are related to mobility. These include deploying and supporting devices and applications to globally dispersed employees. Naturally, security and data governance are major concerns for companies.

It is these priorities and concerns that heighten the value of a customized, controllable enterprise app store by ensuring the keys to the camper remains with the IT department. By doing so, pre-purchasing select applications to make available to a specific community of users becomes commonplace as does safeguarding the corporate data that’s utilized on employees’ devices.

Moreover, there’s the added benefit of realizing economies of scale. For instance, bulk license purchasing can’t be realized by individual’s purchases and without factoring in corporate requirements around purchasing. And managing the distribution of licenses is equally important as is allowing the appropriate amount of flexibility for employees to choose the applications they require or desire.

Traditionally, software purchases at large enterprises have been done via corporate-wide standards; an IT department might obtain a multimillion dollar budget to procure licenses for a particular piece of software for the entire organization. In a world where there are now bite-sized applications available for download to a smartphone or tablet device, there’s a need for a new business configuration that provides a more agile and interactive purchasing model to allow individuals to find and purchase applications that will make them more productive. Now, that same application might not be required by other individuals in that company, thus the corporate-wide purchasing environment wouldn’t be as effective in this scenario. And increasingly, it isn’t.

For your business partners, what could be more enticing than providing a clear route to market by way of a rich catalog of applications and services, not only from your own company but also from your ecosystem? Much more than a simple partner portal, you’re essentially providing your value-added partners with a cutting-edge marketplace that customers can browse for related products and services. That will only help drive partner loyalty as well as business.

Lest we forget, employees are consumers too. Even in the business world a personalized experience matters. The enterprise app store presents a new way for the IT department to serve up relevant applications and services to their users to help them be more productive while providing employees the same social commerce experience to which they’ve now become accustomed.

Isn’t it time to leverage this opportunity to generate new revenue by providing those same IT customers with an apps marketplace for you products or platform, all under your brand?


Mark Sochan is CEO of Partnerpedia, driving overall corporate strategy and building key strategic partnerships. To read more of Mark�s article�s, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves

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