Sunday Sep 14, 2008
Future of portals
Is the purpose of a portal to just aggregate details about services or to provide a unified experience?
Doing some research today, I came across WebCentral's Application Marketplace. It intrigued me, as it's purpose, seemed to be to only aggregate information about other SAAS Service Providers. That, is that it is only a directory of other services, that you would have to join individually (and be billed separately) with different user experiences. I've written before, about the potential benefits, of software multitenancy to drive operational efficiency.
To me it would seem that an Application Marketplace should have the buying and selling in it?
Thus you can see the fundamental issue that I had with it. In my view, an Application Marketplace, should be a Portal, that acts as a SaaS integration point of multiple service providers, with a unified experience for the people that are going to use it.
Tags marketplace saas aggregation portal | Comments 1
Hi Nick, this is a great observation - the Web is full of financial market places, affiliate programme market places, Web site-template market places but for some reason, no cross-vendor application market places. Ironic considering the latter group of vendors know more about how to deliver this from a technological perspective!
Posted by Peter Owens on September 19, 2008 at 05:48 AM CST #