'VARs should look toward app development'

Channel exec says 'your app can make you money with a low cost of sale'

VARs, MSPs and other such solution providers should be eyeing opportunities in app development, delegates heard at Salesforce's Dreamforce event in San Francisco, California this week.

According to Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, SVP of worldwide alliances and channels partner programs and marketing at Salesforce, app development is becoming very "componentised".

"You don't have to write everything from scratch," she said during the annual Salesforce event. "You can assemble a bunch of pieces [or] components to really get to the app you're trying to create. Your IP is less in the heavy lifting of the actual coding and more the thought around what you're trying to create."

She pointed to Lightning, Salesforce's app development platform, as an example, noting that users can build their app from particular components or widgets. Users don't have to build common features, such as calendaring, from scratch, she said.

Taychakhoonavudh added that many Salesforce partners re-use IP they've built and apps they've developed, and after a while that IP increasingly becomes more about a way of doing things.

"App development gives [partners] a way of packaging it up and not always having to be there. We like to say ‘Everybody wants to be an ISV.' You have an app, and just like product versus service, your app can make you money with a low cost of sale, as opposed to services, where you've always got to have people go deliver," she said.

"So I do believe that app development - the idea of reusable IP being monetised - is something [VARs and MSPs] ought to be interested in because in today's world you're trying to figure out how you're going to grow."

During Dreamforce, Salesforce announced that its AppExchange store has seen five million downloads since its launch in January 2006.

Salesforce also debuted new searchability and personalisation features for AppExchange geared toward ISVs this week.