If you're looking for exciting announcements from Oracle this week, then look no further than the Oracle Cloud Marketplace!

If you're looking for exciting announcements from Oracle this week, then look no further than the Oracle Cloud Marketplace! Thomas Kurian (Oracle's Executive VP for Product Development) announced this to the Partner kick off crowd on Sunday afternoon and as the week progressed it was widely referenced in a variety of sessions. It is now Live (take a look here!) and advertising a number of apps for the Oracle Sales and Marketing Clouds (Service Cloud is to follow very soon):

Oracle Cloud Marketplace

What is it?

In summary, the Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a one-stop-shop for Oracle Cloud applications customers to search and purchase apps developed by expert Partners, to enhance the functionality available in their application. Partners have the opportunity to extend the functionality of the Oracle SaaS offerings, before making this available in a consumable app format.

It's our belief at Boxfusion Consulting that this has the potential to really drive the uptake of the Oracle SaaS offerings now - in reality it can be seen as simply plugging a long-standing gap to the Salesforce.com app exchange but that gap did need to be plugged. Oracle is now giving its Partner ecosystem the opportunity to provide extensions to the market across a large breadth of functionality, far more rapidly than could be achieved through Oracle simply extending the core application.

How does it work?

Oracle product development are working closely with key Partners to bring partners' apps onto the marketplace, making them available to all Oracle Sales Cloud or Oracle Marketing Cloud customers. You can search the catalogue for apps of interest and then view information about the app's functionality or request a trial from the provider! Here is a screenshot from the Sales Cloud marketplace search screen:

Browsing the Sales Cloud Marketplace

There are already quite a wide range of apps appearing on the marketplace with the expectation of a huge increase now that it is Live and gaining publicity and exposure. For Partners it is free to list on the marketplace once their application is approved by Oracle and from there they provision the apps and provide the ongoing support, directly to the Cloud SaaS application customers

A couple of examples

One exciting example that we wanted to draw readers' attention to is the Badgeville extension for the Sales Cloud. When we were discussing it with Product Development at OpenWorld, we were excited seeing it as a quick look into the world of gamification - where Badgeville are amongst the market leaders! This app has a Behaviour Platform to drive and reward the behaviours of Salespeople and their daily interactions with the CRM application , using mechanics found in social games and networking sites!

Finally, when discussing the marketplace with some of the Oracle Product Development team, we certainly took away a view that their focus has shifted from pure development of the core product, towards helping Partners develop and extend the SaaS applications through the Cloud Marketplace. When we asked about the much anticipated Quoting engine for the Oracle Sales Cloud, we ended up discussing the industry-leading, app extension from Big Machines - available for download from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace today!

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