Building products and IP on Salesforce

The holy grail among the Salesforce implementation services partner is to create Intellectual Property (IP) that one could package and take to market.

I observe a few broad categories:

1. Solutions that automate ‘edge’ business processes in an organization. These are customer or partner facing. For example, for a pharmaceutical company, it could be a portal for physicians. The SF platform is ideal for such applications that extend business functions
2. Solution accelerators for significant business practices of an industry. For example, a franchise management solution for a Restaurant
3. Extensions to the out-of-the-box offers from SF – specifically to the sales, service, marketing processes
4. Integrations to third party systems
5. “Soft” IP such as CRM migration toolkits, industry templates, quick start packages are other strategies you see amongst partners

So how does one go about figuring out candidate solutions that can enabled as IP ….. I have the following guidelines:

1. Analyze edge applications in an industry
2. Some app exchange ISVs may have apps for these candidates. Good to know strengths and weaknesses of the choices that customers have. By the way, there is room for more than one solution
3. Analyze custom applications you are building for your customers for pointers to where the need and gap are.