Salesforce.com's marketplace extension

Salesforce.com is contemplating a new service that would enable its customers of its CRM platform to share leads, opportunities and custom objects with each other. As a way to stir up interest, the company is asking for names of the "proposed" service and put up a poll. With 82 votes in, S2S (Salesforce to Salesforce) has the lead (the Vizu Web poll service used for the voting is nicely done).

It sounds like an idea that is well along the development path, and in line with salesforce.com's platform focus and AppExchange marketplace. With Force.com, salesforce.com has opened its platform so that developers can run their code on salesforce servers. An extension of the marketplace and a unified platform would be to allow customers to share sales leads, opportunities and custom objects. I would guess that that such a marketplace would be transactional as well.

Nick Carr, author of the forthcoming "The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny," which has now been renamed more precisely "Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," had this to say about saleforce.com's proposed sharing service.

For Salesforce and other multitenant vendors, the big payoff would be the creation of a strong network effect. As companies begin trading data within a system, their partners would have a big incentive to join the system as well. At some point, a critical mass might be reached, setting off a snowball effect. Of course, where there's a network effect, there's also a lock-in effect. Convenience has a price.