eBay latest web giant to open platform to ISVs
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Software developers will be able to add applications to auction site’s online tool set
Online auction and ecommerce site eBay has announced plans to allow independent software vendors (ISVs) to build and run applications on its site.
The initial focus of Project Echo is on the 700,000 users of the company’s Selling Manager online tool, which helps auction sellers manage multiple sales. eBay will sell independently developed applications that execute within Selling Manager, taking a cut of the proceeds.
The project will eventually expand to include software to help buyers, the company said.
“Rather than having eBay try to build every feature [for Selling Manager], we should open up the platform and integrate others’ work,” Max Mancini, eBay’s senior director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation, told the Reuters new agency. “We have realised that we need to allow sellers and developers to get together a little bit more easily.”
The move sees eBay capitalise on the market of buyers its website attracts to become a software reseller and infrastructure provider. It presents a model of ‘cloud computing’ in which Internet giants build computing platforms around very specific business functions – in this case, ecommerce and auctions – rather than universally applicable IT resources.
eBay joins social networking site Facebook and online customer relationship management provider Salesforce.com in offering the former type of cloud computing - their online development platforms relate specifically to their respective applications.
Fellow dot-com household name Amazon.com offers the latter kind with its Amazon Web Services development tools, which can be used to build all kinds of web application.
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