Red Hat Picks AppDirect To Run Its Developer Marketplace

One of the legacies that Apple founder Steve Jobs left the technology world is the AppStore. It seems amazing to think back to a time when the ability to buy applications from a central marketplace (and, now, many many central marketplaces) didn’t exist. The Apple AppStore was the start of a massive growth in vendors offering third party solutions via a central hub. The rationale is obvious – by creating a vibrant ecosystem of players in a marketplace, platform vendors greatly increase the stickiness of their own platforms while creating themselves new revenue streams.

But if you're a platform vendor without an app marketplace, there is significant heavy lifting to do in order to build a marketplace. And where heavy lifting exists, vendors soon arise to help with it. This is the raison d'être of AppDirect. The company sells a platform that allows vendors to create, package, sell and manage cloud ecosystems. AppDirect is the marketplace product that powers app stores for the likes of Samsung, Deutsche Telekom, Staples and more.

The company is today extending that list with the addition of Red Hat. Red Hat is using AppDirect to power the marketplace for its OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) product. The idea is pretty simple – OpenShift developers can buy add-on services to extend their applications from within OpenShift. From Red Hat’s perspective it’s a tried and true model – other PaaS vendors like Heroku and CloudFoundry have a similar model. Users sign in using their existing credentials and billing is integrated directly into the platform.

Many years ago I did a consulting job looking at rolling out an application marketplace for a large telecommunications company. That marketplace never got off the ground, in part because of traditional telco “not built here” mentalities. The company wanted to build their own product from the ground up. The use case for building a marketplace very rarely stacks up and hence the project was a long, drawn-out failure. If only said telco could have swallowed its pride and bought a pre-built platform like the one AppDirect sells – they could be enjoying higher customer retention and increased revenues.

Cloud marketplaces are a total no-brainer. Using a third party marketplace platform like AppDirect strikes me as the best way forward in most situations.