Celebrating the AppExchange’s 10th Birthday: A Look Back
Like many in the Salesforce community, Internet Creations is celebrating the AppExchange’s 10th birthday. And what would a birthday celebration be without cake?
With 3.5 million app installs over the past ten years, the AppExchange is more than just a reason to have cake; it’s a critical enabler for customers and partners to enhance Salesforce and further increase the return on their investment. For Internet Creations, the AppExchange has had even greater impact.
After all, without the AppExchange, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Salesforce Helped Us Gain Efficiency.
Deliver faster service. Provide a better customer experience. Empower our employees. We started using Salesforce in 2004 because we wanted to accomplish these goals. And while the power of Salesforce brought us gains in productivity, minor gaps in standard functionality kept us from reaching the high level of operational efficiency we aimed for.
How did we bridge these gaps? Initially, we considered buying solutions, but we wrestled with the difficulties of finding off-the-shelf apps that met our needs. In the dark times before the AppExchange existed, there was no well-curated marketplace where we could search for and install trustworthy apps.
So we developed solutions for ourselves. We acted on our ideas, took advantage of the flexibility Salesforce had to offer, and built our own enhancements.
The next challenge came when our customers saw our success with our refinements and wanted the same for themselves. We provided our customers with the enhancements that would eventually become our first app, Email to Case Premium. However, installation and release version management were cumbersome. To truly take advantage of this unexpected business opportunity, we needed a simple and straightforward way to share our enhancements with our customers.
The AppExchange Changed the Game.
Enter the AppExchange. Suddenly, organizations could quickly and easily find and install the apps they needed.
So that even more organizations could enjoy the same success, we released Email to Case Premium on the AppExchange. From academic institutions like Oregon State University’s College of Business to global manufacturing enterprises like Honeywell Aerospace, organizations across industries use Email to Case Premium to cut clicks and slash seconds off their case response times. The result: happier, more productive agents and delighted, loyal customers.
Building on the success of our first app, we shifted our business focus to Salesforce app development. With the AppExchange, we now had a platform to make our efficiency-boosting Salesforce solutions readily available for the benefit of organizations of all sizes.
Twelve Apps (and Counting).
Email to Case Premium was just the start. We currently offer a dozen apps on the AppExchange to help our customers become more efficient with Salesforce, saving them time and money.
The benefits of the AppExchange haven’t been limited to sharing our own apps. We have been able to buy solutions to address our current challenges. For example, we’ve implemented the 100% native app Accounting Seed to run accounting entirely on Salesforce.
Over the past 10 years, Internet Creations has enjoyed tremendous success thanks to Salesforce and the AppExchange. As a customer, Salesforce enables us to operate efficiently and deliver better service. As a partner, we help other organizations get the most out of their Salesforce investments. Our 100% native AppExchange apps, including the Case Management Power Pack, provide everything you need to deliver world-class service with Salesforce.
As a customer and a partner…well, you might say that we get to have our cake and eat it, too.
Happy birthday, AppExchange! We look forward to another 10 years (and many more)!
