Article by Laurie McCabe

What is an App Store?

An app store, which offers a lot more than just mobile apps, is a Web site that aggregates software solutions for business or personal use. App stores, also known as an applications marketplace, are typically created and built by a “marquee” vendor, such as Adobe, Apple, Google, Intuit or Salesforce.com, that serves as the anchor tenant for the marketplace. App stores serve as a hub where you can discover, search for, purchase and deploy integrated third-party applications.

The marquee vendors that run the marketplaces typically have a strong brand and a large customer base -- but no one vendor will ever have the time or expertise to build every possible application that a customer might want. But marquee vendors can attract developers to build complementary applications to sell to their large customer bases.

The developer gets a new sales channel, and the marquee vendor can offer customers a bigger, more diverse array of applications than it could possibly provide on its own. In many cases, developers must also build their applications on the marquee vendor’s platform so that they will integrate with other applications in the marketplace.

Deploying Google’s Gmail for my internet marketing business has allowed minimal and secure IT administration of my 8 websites (28+ email accounts). Supporting a mixed operating environment which includes Microsoft, Ubuntu and MacOS, multiple browsers, and document file formats from Microsoft Office, Open Office is made possible and easier with an in-the-cloud computing environment like Gmail.

So why would you consider cloud computing like Google Mail for your business, especially an SME (small medium enterprise)?

In a two words – security and compliance. E-mail security, web security and message compliance are the underlying benefits to solid business reasons to have your mail and office documents served through Gmail.

One week^† into its public launch, the Google Apps Marketplace has just under 1,500 (enterprise) apps. Combined with Salesfore.com's app exchange (also with over a thousand apps), enterprises interested in moving to cloud apps have an increasing number of software tools to choose from.

 

Popular apps (measured in terms of # of installs) includes graphic design and office integration apps (aviary design suite and offisync), a collaboration and project management tool (manymoon), a free travel planner (tripit), a basic ERP app (myerp.com), and a CRM application (Zoho CRM).