Adobe and Cornerstone OnDemand join the Shift to App stores

By Jim Lundy

The shift to Software Ecosystems is being fueled by Enterprise App Stores. Earlier this week Cornerstone OnDemand announced its Talent Management focused App Marketplace and today Adobe announced its App Exchange for its Marketing Cloud. We have been discussing this shift for a while and with these and other announcements this year, it is now clear that Enterprise App Stores have gone mainstream.

Cornerstone OnDemand made its announcement at its annual Customer Summit, which was held in San Diego. We were there and thought it was a solid move. We counted nine apps, which include applications such as Achievers, Citrix Go-To-Meeting, Cisco WebEx and HireVue Video Recruiting. Cornerstone also announced integrations with Content providers such as Big Think, Korn Ferry and Skillsoft.

Adobe made its announcement of the Marketing Cloud Exchange today at its event in Europe and they have 150 applications that have been pre-integrated into the Marketing Cloud. Adobe is in a race with others such as IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and others to build the best Marketing Suite Ecosystem.

App Store vs Custom Integration

In the old days, it was always the issue of finding the right integrator to connect different apps together. It was often tedious and expensive. Cloud based SaaS apps are changing that. App Stores that offer pre-integrated are beginning to replace the old way of doing app integration. On top of that, the deployment can happen very fast.

Box, Google, IBM, Jive, Microsoft and Salesforce were early movers

The shift to Cloud Marketplaces is not new. The firm that seems to get the most awareness for its app store is Salesforce.com, but Box, Google, IBM, Jive, and Microsoft have their own marketplaces as well, as do many others. The shift to  Enterprise App Stores is gaining traction.

App Stores and Business Applications

We think that app stores are part of the shift to what we refer to as business applications. When a standard SaaS app can be integrated quickly with other apps, it is essentially tuned to meet the needs of the business team. The shift to App Stores is not slowing down. In fact our prediction that we published earlier this year reflects this move:

By YE 2015, 40% of software providers will offer apps via their own or a third-party app store.

It is important to note that not all app stores are the same and not all offer fully integrated applications. However, the overwhelming majority do. Next time you or your firm starts looking at Software providers, ask them about their App Store. Of course, you can also talk with us about who is doing what in Enterprise App Stores.

Related Research

The Rise of the Marketing Suite: Eight Elements you can’t Ignore

Predictive Business Applications: Don’t Get Left Behind

Aragon Research Predictions, 2014; the shift to Predictive and Collaborative