Web Office vendor Etelos announced recently that it is enabling enterprise customers to white-label the Etelos platform, via a multi-product offering called the Etelos Platform Suite (detailed below). Up till now, Etelos has been a company that offers a wide range of apps and services to developers and vendors – it took care of everything from billing to customer management. Most of that service offering was done via a proprietary platform. Essentially, now Etelos is letting other companies use that platform to do the very same thing.
This is interesting, because Etelos has in many ways built a business off the back of other platforms – such as Google Apps, iPhone, Netvibes, Pageflakes and Windows Live. Now Etelos is a full-fledged platform itself.
The “Etelos Platform Suite” is squarely aimed at Enterprise. Etelos Founder and CEO Danny Kolke said in the announcement that “our larger partners want the opportunity to have their own marketplaces and tools to manage distribution channels.” He also noted that large partners now have applications “that they need to move to the web for implementation and scalability.”
This is precisely what IBM recently told us, when explaining why Big Blue is now making serious moves in the browser. IBM told us that their customers don’t want to do installs anymore, that they want the rich experience that desktop apps have traditionally provided – but they want to have it in the browser. IBM is the biggest software services company in the world for enterprises, so if they are moving applications to the browser – it’s clearly what most big enterprises want these days. Therefore we think this is a very smart move by Etelos, one that is sure to find good demand from enterprises.
Although the terminology is a bit confusing (over-use of the words ‘platform’ and ‘SaaS’, for a start), it’s worth breaking down what makes up the Etelos Platform Suite. According to Etelos, it consists of four key products:
- SaaS Application Platform: Technology that enables traditional (“shrink-wrapped”) software to be distributed as Software as a Service.
- SaaS Marketplace Platform: Easily managed Marketplace that integrates licensing, billing and account management that is designed for Web app distribution.
- SaaS Distribution Platform: Turnkey Marketplace with a company’s products or services integrated into it.
- SaaS Syndication Platform: Application developers can publish their app via a network of distributors.
We will continue to track what innovative startups like Etelos, and bigcos like IBM, are doing in the Web Office space. See ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise channel for more news and analysis on these trends.
