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A new way to browse, share, and install on-demand applications

First came Web sites like Amazon.com and eBay. Then virtual music centers put songs at people’s fingertips. So why hasn’t someone created an iTunes for business applications?

Now they have. The AppExchange from salesforce.com makes finding and installing new on-demand applications as easy as downloading a song or buying a book online.

With the AppExchange, companies can browse and test drive dozens of new on-demand applications and install them into any salesforce.com account with just a few clicks.

The AppExchange is the world’s first on-demand application-sharing service. It’s a new online center where salesforce.com subscribers, partners, and developers can share their on-demand applications for everything from handling expense management to tracking purchasing, monitoring recruiting, and beyond.

See how it works

Who it’s for

TechCrunch Describes..

The best indication of the growth of Salesforce as a platform has been that now over 40% of requests to Salesforce web servers are SOAP requests to their API. AppExchange is the application platform at Salesforce and today its library of applications has over 160 applications listed within it, all of which are available to Salesforce customers. At eTech Salesforce plan to announce the launch of their new developer community – the AppExchange Developer Network, which provides developers with the community, tools and resources to let them build applications for AppExchange. Salesforce will also be announcing the availability of toolkits for both PHP (supporting the native SOAP libraries in PHP5 – developed in collaboration with Zend) and something that is very exciting, a RubyOnRails toolkit called ActiveSalesforce.

Salesforce refers to what we know as Web 2.0 in the consumer space as ‘The Business Web’ in the business space. The technologies and ideas behind Web 2.0 such as Ajax, SOAP, Software as a service etc. all started out in the business space and their breakout into the consumer space resulted in the Web 2.0 we know today. While businesses and products such as the early Salesforce were the instigators and drivers popularizing the technology the growth of the consumer Web 2.0 resulted in the business space being forgotten. The purpose of the AppExchange Developer Network is to make it much easier for developers of mashups and other applications to apply their skills in the business space and to have their solutions showcased to the large user base that Salesforce has.

Read the Whole Article [Via TechCrunch]