Salesforce Launches A Private Version Of AppExchange For Companies To Manage Their Own App Stores

Salesforce.com is launching the capability for customers to install a private version of AppExchange, the company’s app marketplace. The new “Private AppExchange,” available Friday, gets implemented as an instance on a company’s Salesforce SaaS environment and is designed to integrate with the now generally available Salesforce Identity platform.

Customers may install their own apps and third-party apps on the private AppExchange Customers may also add their own branding. The AppExchange supports mobile, Web and desktop applications and integrates with Salesforce Chatter

The private AppExchange also offers a dashboard to see page views and other data sources.

Salesforce executives said they timed the service in parallel with the launch of Salesforce Identity, which they are playing as a way to integrate apps behind one authentication service.

To use Salesforce Identity, a customer must also install ForgeRock Bridge SPE, a turnkey software appliance that requires a customer to install an on-premise appliance to federate identities between their enterprise and Salesforce cloud services environment. Offerings from service such as Okta, the SaaS identity platform, do not require an on-premise appliance. Instead, the service federates a customer’s enterprise identity environments with a private app marketplace. Okta, at this point, does not integrate with Salesforce private AppExchange.

AppExchange, Bitnami and services such as SnapLogic offer different takes on the private app store. Salesforce has an advantage in how it can integrate with its public AppExchange but the service is still emerging. The private AppExchange does have an identity capability but it still requires companies to install software on their own servers to take advantage of a cloud service.