Servoy Solution Catalogue on servoy.com

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Servoy Solution Catalogue on servoy.com

Postby Bernd.N » Tue Mar 31, 2015 9:33 am

On servoy.com you can read today "428 ISVs empower 2,118,097 daily users". That means there are hundreds of great and stable servoy solutions out there.

Therefore, I would like to encourage the idea to put an easy-to-use catalogue of all Servoy based solutions on a dedicated website under servoy.com. That would be a win-win-situation both for Servoy and for the ISVs.

I know that in the past, developers are a bit reluctant to speak about their solution, sometimes they think someone could "steal" their idea. But lets face it, ideas are worth nothing, you can get tons of ideas just by searching "business software" or any other key word in the web.

Most easy would be a flat table "solutions" plus the tables "industries" (like trade, service provider, engineers...) and "solution_types". Potential Customers could then search a solution by picking their industry and their solution_type they need.
And most elegant would be a Servoy8-powered solution, which a new intern could maybe do to train himself inside servoy developer.

For the big players, such a solution catalogue is a matter of course:
SAP does this by offering an "Industries & Solutions" catalogue here: https://websmp106.sap-ag.de/public/home
Microsoft shows a solution catalogue here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/partners.aspx
And Oracle offers 8.000+ solutions here: https://solutions.oracle.com/scwar/scr/index.html

Another advantage could be that Servoy ISVs find each other to exchange know-how on specific topics, like accounting modules, crm modules, human ressources modules or anything else.
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Re: Servoy Solution Catalogue on servoy.com

Postby mboegem » Tue Mar 31, 2015 1:35 pm

That idea has already been launched: http://servoy.com/marketplace
although not a huge success...
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Re: Servoy Solution Catalogue on servoy.com

Postby Bernd.N » Tue Mar 31, 2015 3:27 pm

The current sub-heading of the Servoy Marketplace is "Pre-build Servoy Components", and the first items you see are key listeners, plugins and beans.
That's a difference to the marketplaces of SAP, Microsoft and Oracle I pointed to.

The website is good, it may just need a UI work over so that it looks again fresh and modern. :)
The key question would be how many companies would be interested in such a relaunch.

The baseline is, we are all good developers, some even great, however regarding marketing we should get help from specialists from time to time.
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Re: Servoy Solution Catalogue on servoy.com

Postby david » Tue Mar 31, 2015 7:36 pm

Servoy's business model hasn't been about community growth for years, it's about subscriptions. Even their services is all about driving subscriptions. Explains why the original marketplace wasn't developer or community focused, it was a marketing tool — a glorified image gallery for all the actual use it received. From this perspective it was probably a success for its time.
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Re: Servoy Solution Catalogue on servoy.com

Postby Bernd.N » Wed Apr 01, 2015 9:59 am

Right, though Servoy's revenue comes at day's end from the customers of the ISVs, which is equal to the licences the ISVs sell.
As far as I know, every sold ISV-license leads to a Servoy-Client-license.
So a professional marketplace would also be in the very interest of Servoy.

As there are hundreds of ISVs, they could even share the costs for a professionally designed marketplace.
For example, 100 ISVs times 200 $ would lead to a budget of 20.000$. With that you have plenty of budget to invest into a professional Servoy8 marketplace solution that could show what Servoy8 can do and which nice UI it can present on the web.
That's the reason I said it would be a win-win-situation.

Another idea would be to create a quality logo "Made with Servoy", similar to logos like "Made in the U.S." or "Made in Germany".
That way the ISVs would have another unique selling proposition.
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Re: Servoy Solution Catalogue on servoy.com

Postby Jan Aleman » Wed Apr 01, 2015 12:35 pm

Hi Bernd,

The idea of the marketplace was exactly that. Unfortunately it was very hard to get ISVs to put their data in, keep it up to date and get traffic to it. Which is why it's a bit in maintenance mode at the moment. We've extensively researched what we could do about it but don't have a solution; if you have suggestions keep them coming.

At the moment the most successful marketplaces are surrounding finished products. eg Salesforce has a successful marketplace. In the case of Servoy because we provide a platform vs a SaaS product it is much more challenging as we don't have millions of direct end customers as most of them use our technology through an ISV product.
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Re: Servoy Solution Catalogue on servoy.com

Postby Bernd.N » Wed Apr 01, 2015 1:46 pm

Hi Jan,

yes I am aware of the Salesforce marketplace, and I am strongly against the idea to build a CRM product and then put anything else you need (which is IMO 75% for most businesses) on top of that with dozens of "apps".
Today we have a trend towards "appification", i.e. tons of apps solve every small problem nicely, but you will end up also with dozens of different user interfaces, UI concepts etc. pp.

My own vision is to build a more integrated solution.

I agree that it would be challenging to get sufficient traffic and end user interest to any marketplace site, because that is what would be needed to make it a success.
However we do have a lot of unique selling propositions with Servoy: Java Script based, strong postgres support (which means a low-cost-SQL-DB), large Servoy developer community, to mention just a few.

Basically, my idea to suggest a relaunch of a solution catalogue website stems from looking at this huge ISV count of 428, and I thought what could those ISVs do together when they pool their interests in product marketing?

PS: Marc Benioff's book "Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry" is a must-read for any ISV, he shares a lot of valueable ideas. What I do not like is his attitude to coin terms like "No software" just to look better than the competition, while Salesforce is certainly 100% software.
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Re: Servoy Solution Catalogue on servoy.com

Postby david » Wed Apr 01, 2015 8:09 pm

Servoy has an opportunity to build a marketplace dynamic around their NG components. One of the main points of this whole discussion about the package format: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20691&start=30#p111153.

With good descriptor files, you can make 3rd party components discoverable, sharable and installable directly from within Serclipse.
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