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SAN FRANCISCO—Lew Tucker, vice president of AppExchange at Salesforce.com Inc., spent a few good and formative years at Sun Microsystems Inc. developing Java as a technology. Always with the vision of on-demand development capabilities, but never quite the opportunity to get there with Sun, Tucker took a position at Salesforce.com to run the companys corporate Web site. That job quickly evolved into the development of AppExchange, a platform that enables users to develop, buy, sell and rate applications—and build a community around the whole process. Tucker sat down with Senior Writer Renee Boucher Ferguson at Salesforce.coms AppExchange Day and Winter 06 release event here Tuesday to talk about the vision for AppExchange and how his experience in the past may just help Salesforce.com achieve its goals in the future.
At what point did you come into the AppExchange development?
I joined Salesforce a year ago running their corporate Web site—Salesforce.com and all of that. Thats what I was given the assignment for in June, to go and build a Web site to host these applications. [I]t was really … when I started working on [the Web site] that I started thinking of it much more [as] what were now envisioning it as—this eBay of applications, something that has community involvement and user feedback and RSS feeds, and ratings and making it really fit that model to be the best of these sites to be on the Internet, and turn that around. That took the concept, which was originally about allowing customers to share their applications, to save them away safely. As we approached that more, … I found myself designing more of a service—which the AppExchange.com is—so that not just customers could share applications, but partners could. I think our vision for where that is going is that a whole range of services can start to go out through that channel, for our development partners and everything else.
How much of the work that you did at Sun plays into your work with AppExchange?
About 100 percent. I was part of the first JavaSoft team, so I from the early Java days of 95 was thinking about the evolution of software as a service—whats the suitable content and how software should be able to run anywhere. I put up java.sun.com and we helped the Java developer network get going. So my first task for Java was to go get 1,000 applications developed on Java the first year. The only way I knew how to do that was to go to the Internet. So we did that immediately, put everything we could for free, so that everyone had easy access to it, and started driving the entire development community. Also, working with the VCs and the whole infrastructure thats required for software development—youve got to get the key people lined up; youve got to get the umbrella thats officially in the market. Im a Ph.D. in computer science, but I knew thats what it was going to take. And very much we applied the Sun model when looking at this, so here we have a new platform. So in fact it was around the March timeframe when we were launching CustomForce, and I kept saying, “Our announcements got to be around the platform.” It was a little early for that, but thats what Ive always viewed this thing as—as a platform play. And thats what it turned out to be.”
Where did your efforts at Sun go?
That contributed a lot to the growth of Java as a technology. We were quickly at a ramp to getting millions of developers involved in Java technology, because what developers are always looking for is a way for them to market, or even pre-market, their applications. Developers like to build things, and they like other people to use them.
Next Page: Too much automation?
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How much do developers want their work automated? Im thinking of all the automated tasks in AppExchange. Where do you draw the line?
[The thing] that motivate[s] a developer [is] being able to invent new things that look cool and that … user[s] of the product feel they are thrilled by. And you want to do as little work as possible. Thats why we have tools. We have an integrated development environment, we have ISPs that can host our servers. We dont want to learn any of that stuff. We want other people to do that. And so in developing the AppExchange itself, that was exactly the model we took. I do not want to put up my own database, so I could use Salesforces [database]. And I built an AppExchange application, which is AppExchange.com. And that actually is following the same model. I made tables in Salesforce, which instead of representing contacts and accounts and everything else, it represented application description and user reviews. Those are the tables that are inside of Salesforce, powering the AppExchange. So that meant I didnt have to spend any time hiring a database administrator, going to my IT department. The joke at Salesforce has always been that the time it would have taken the IT department at Salesforce to give me a database, we built the application. So developers love highly leveraged things like that. What we have to be able to do now is show and create awareness within the larger development community.
Are you done automating the functionality that you wanted to, or do you think theres a lot more to do?
Were never done, never done. I think that weve gone very, very far as it is today. Now actually [there are] more—Marc [Benioff, Salesforce.coms chairman and CEO,] had made mention of other AppExchange directories—things like that. We have for example on the site today RSS. Why? Because everyone should have RSS. Its a syndication technology. We could see if thats some of the technology we should have around applications, so other people can set up other directories…an enterprise may have its own list of applications. So there are a lot of other dimensions well be exploring. More and more opportunities will be developing.
I am still confused about the level of integration AppExchange provides with third-party applications, and also out to legacy applications.
[T]here was an application developed by Trillium, a data-cleansing app. Up until recently with the AppExchange, the way that Trillium would be integrated in Salesforce is that there would be a professional services engagement and somebody would go in and build, in essence, a connector that would go across the Net that would go in and connect a customer with the Trillium service. With the AppExchange, now you can go in and install from the AppExchange an interconnection between our Salesforce service and the Trillium service. So that application is actually the integration. So now integration is click, click, click. It doesnt require professional services to do the integration.
Is this the same with legacy applications?
There is no magic in this world. So something that has not been designed to be integrated with Web services, somebody has to do the work. I would expect we will see more and more applications added to the AppExchange that will be these integrations into other hosted software legacy systems, because smaller companies will say, “Gee, I know how to do that. I did it for two other companies. What if I package that and put it on the AppExchange market.” Thats where were seeing AppExchange changing a lot of the dynamics of what was traditionally the integration world, and professional services into the information about the applications, which are connecting points.
Who do you think has the capability to do something like AppExchange?
Google [Inc.] can do anything they want to, but theyre not likely to go into this. I think this is a real Greenfield opportunity for us. We sort of have a history of innovation at such a rapid pace, that now were outdistancing [competitors]. And now I think that we are actually pulling ahead of that pack, and there will be people following in our draft. But with AppExchange and everything weve done with the ability to have customization and rapid development of applications, [it] just puts us now ahead. Weve talked about the ecosystem, and the fact that we have other partners working with us, that now starts creating momentum. That I think will pull us even further ahead of the pack. If you look [at] the partners of our competitors, theyre not as engaged in terms of being able to be integrated with what theyre doing. Part of this whole model with AppExchange and the platform is to use the network effect of everybody elses work.
Next Page: Partners and the competition.
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Whats your vision for partners? Is it big system integrators that weigh more heavily in the success of AppExchange, or third-party developers?
Part of it has to do with our core values of the company. We are trying to be democratic. We cant pretend to know whos going to be the most important partner. Will it be a big partner? Will it be some little unknown partner? We dont know. And so we very much have designed this so all partners of all sizes can play, and that we feel is that democratic principal in terms of growing this ecosystem. We feel there are plenty of niches for everybody. We dont know which of those niches are going to be most useful to us, and most useful to our partners. So we want to be able to allow the whole thing to grow.
Who are you keeping your eye on in terms of competition?
The ones we dont know about. Thats always. The best bet will be more companies like Salesforce that are moving very quickly and are willing to take an approach that leverages the very best of the technology.
From a technology standpoint, what do you have on a company like SAP [AG], which is working on an on-demand platform, or Oracle [Corp.], which is acquiring Siebel [Systems Inc.]?
We dont have their legacy. Thats what we dont have. We dont have the customers that hold them back. They have to spend the most … effort keeping their current customers happy and the market happy, with their renewals and things like that. The on-demand model is a very different model, and its hard to bridge that. So traditional companies always have that legacy. That would be the biggest issue. If theyre in the position of selling against their own product—thats the problem that Siebel has had, and I dont know how you solve that. The support revenue, the ripple effect of supporting four or five versions out there in the field, of customers that demand you support it, is very hard. You cant move your engineering team on to new things, because theyre all on maintenance.
In terms of the AppExchange infrastructure, it sounds like everything is new—the hardwares new, the softwares new. Did you OEM components from third parties, or develop it all in-house?
We do a refresh of this [technology]. With mirror force we have totally new hardware infrastructure that we had to build up with the new data centers. The software were constantly refreshing, so there are a lot of components that we are reusing. Were re-architecting the way we do that; you almost have to, to move forward and get faster and better and more reliable going forward.
Whats the message you want to get to developers?
We want to tell them to take a look at AppExchange, that they should get a developer account—its free and they should play. Thats what the beauty of this is: You dont know where that next killer app is going to come from, and I suspect it will be someone we dont know—a solitary developer or a small group of developers, a software team that will have a developer account they can sign up for on the Net, and they will turn around some great stuff. What I liked most about Java was working with the small, cutting innovative developers—little companies like WebLogic that became BEA [Systems Inc.]. Thats where a lot of innovation happens.
Are you targeting any developer types?
Its really across the board. In the alliances team, we are targeting across the board. It can be small companies, an individual developer from India, and some of the largest companies. We very much would like to be able to address all of those.
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