Appexchange.com: A new way to bridge the gap between software developers and their customers

See “Salesforce apps now available on the run” (Database, page 3)
By Jon Fernquest

Let’s say you’re a Thai SME owner and you're traveling all the time to visit your customers. You need information on your company's server, but you can’t access it with your mobile phone. What can you do?

Let’s say you’re a Thai software developer. You want to write an affordable Thai language program that Thai SMEs can use to access data on their company’s server from their mobile phone. Getting information about new products and customers to salespeople in the field is difficult. You want to make it easier. The only problem is that you have to write four separate programs for four separate platforms: Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. Java might work for all these platforms, but it’s probably going to be too slow.

You can see the problem. There is a gap between what the customer wants and what the software developer can provide. Appexchange.com is a new company trying to bridge this gap.

What Stephen Russell, Saleforce.com’s CEO for the Asia-Pacific region, has to say about opportunities in the Thai software business is very encouraging. Thai software developers might ask: If I write a Thai language application program, won’t I just find it being sold for free in Pantip Plaza next week? or Won’t some open source programmer just copy my program and make it available for free from the Sourceforge open source software site? The answer is: not if it meets specialized customer needs. Your program is unlikely to be pirated if it meets the specialized business needs of small groups of customers. First, you have to find what these needs are by doing some marketing research to better define market segments to target. One good way to research customer needs is to work as a computer consultant customizing your software to meet client needs.

If your Thai language software meets the needs of a narrowly defined business specialty, it is unlikely to be turned into an Open Source project. For example, the topic once arose on the Slashdot forum about building an open source library catalogue system. A specialist in this sort of application pointed out that knowledge of business processes was usually just as important as programming knowledge. Open source computer programmers usually do not have this business knowledge. Knowledge of the processes of cataloguing and purchasing books in libraries and the conventions for exchanging information with book publishers could only be obtained by work experience with library cataloging applications. This sort of knowledge was not available in any book and could not be learned in any school.

Make sure to check out what Chalermpon Punnotok, a Thai winner of a 2005 Asia-Pacific ICT Award, has to say about software development in Thailand in today's Bangkok Post (See Database, page 3). Also check out applications specialized for the needs of different industries such as healthcare, real estate, and conference management at Appexchange.com. What specialized applications might Thai business people find useful? What about applications in the agricultural, hotel, restaurant, tourism, and conventions (MICE) industries?

Vocabulary (in discussion above)

bridge the gap - connect two disconnected things
SME - Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, most businesses in Thailand's economy are SMEs not large companies (See Wikipedia:Small_and_medium_sized_enterprises)
software developer - a person or company that makes writes computer programs
salespeople in the field - salespeople working out of the office visiting the companies of customers
Java - Java ME (Micro Edition) is the version of Java found on many mobile phones, used for games most of the time (See Wikipedia:Java_ME)
client - a more formal word for "customer"
library catalog - the computer where you search for books in a library (See Wikipedia:Library_catalog) and for example Chulalongkorn’s online library catalog
business processes - (See Wikipedia:Business_processes and Wikipedia:Automated_business_processes)

Vocabulary (in article)

apps – computer applications, a computer program that performs a specialized function, for example word processors, spreadsheets, accounting, or games (See Wikipedia:Computer_software)
on the run – do it while you are busy doing something else because you have no time, for example eat on the run while you’re walking to a lunchtime dental appointment
on-demand – get it when you want it
flagship – most important for a company, for example a flagship product, store
CRM – Customer Relations Management software, the software and business processes that help a company manage customer relationships (See Wikipedia:Customer_relationship_management)
operating system - the software that runs the whole computer, Windows XP is the operating system that most people are familiar with (See Wikipedia:Operating_system)
Blackberry – a wireless email device for businessmen, supports push e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, web browsing and other services (See Wikipedia:Blackberry)
Palm – the first and most popular handheld computer (See Wikipedia:Palm)
Windows Mobile – the Windows operating system that runs on Pocket PCs, Smartphones, and Portable Media Centers (See Wikipedia:Windows_mobile).
Symbian – the mobile phone operating system used by Nokia, Panasonic, Siemens AG, and Sony Ericsson. (See Wikipedia:Symbian_OS)
a roadshow – a group of people who travel around the country as part of an advertising campaign
a platform – a computing platform, a hardware or software system that allows software to run on top of it, an operating system is one example (See Wikipedia:Platform_computing)
a mobile platform – a computing platform for mobile phones
appexchange.com – “the first online service for sharing business applications. It makes finding and installing new on-demand apps as easy as downloading a song or buying a book online” (See homepage)
ported – porting computer software from one platform to another platform (See Wikipedia:)
up to the minute data – information that is always current
a mashup of applications – a combination of applications (See Wikipedia:Mashup)
Skype – provides internet phone calls (See Wikipedia:Skype)
Business Objects – a French company that sells business software for reporting and analyzing data (See Wikipedia:Business_objects_company)
joined the bandwagon – join everyone else and do something popular
a marketing and delivery channel – a way of getting a companies product to the customer (See Wikipedia:Distribution)
wireless carriers – companies that own a wireless and sell a wireless service
single point of deployment, write once and deploy
head-to-head – two people or companies competing directly with each other
bandwidth hungry applications – computer programs that transfer a lot of data over the network
3G – the next generation of mobile phone technology in Thailand, will allow you to exchange photos, watch video, download information, exchange email, and use instant messaging (See Wikipedia:3G).
WiMAX – WiMAX is a new wireless technology that provides wider coverage than Wi-Fi technology.

More things to read

This site has a list of innovative features in online library catalogs. The author of the page found them by using library catalogs over the internet (so you could say he did marketing research on computer applications over the internet for free, which makes this something most students could do). Read about the business model behind Appexchange here, here and here.

Posted by Jon Fernquest at 10:00 AM