BMC Software today released the BMC Marketplace, a turnkey solution that enables customers to develop their own, external facing app store with a functionality comparable to the AWS marketplace. The BMC Marketplace is deployed as a SaaS solution that can manage everything from app branding, licensing protocols, custom-built app search taxonomies and monetization of mobile, desktop and other applications. Instead of building their own marketplace from scratch, interested parties can now leverage BMC’s Marketplace technology to set up a fully functional marketplace within 6-12 weeks. The BMC Marketplace differs from its AppZone product, which delivers internal facing apps for corporate users as a result of its acquisition of Partnerpedia.
Christine Dover, Research Director, Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce Research, IDC Software Business Solutions Group, remarked on the significance of BMC’s Marketplace as follows:
Customers and partners have been asking for faster, better ways to experience and deploy software. The answer clearly is the app – particularly mobile apps. BMC Marketplace will transform how businesses automate the publishing and purchasing of on-line applications, drive and track sales leads, and increase sales velocity and efficiency.
The 6-12 week deployment phase begins with BMC’s requirements gathering of customer needs and expectations followed by the set-up of branding and site appearance, before the final phase marked by go-live of business processes and the integration of apps into the marketplace. BMC’s Marketplace additionally offers customers data and analytics on app usage, details of specific app components on which users clicked and data about how users navigated to the app. As mentioned in the company’s press release, Gartner predicts that 25% of large companies will create their own app store by 2017. Expect BMC to build upon its early positioning in the turnkey, app marketplace space while analogous app marketplaces proliferate because of the potential for marketplaces to accelerate customer ability to experience software applications.
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