Do we need enterprise software marketplaces?
Summary
Because Atlassian didn’t impose an extreme tax, they were able to bring together a strong set of vendors building add-on software specifically customized for their suite of tools such as Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket. Soon, walls of custom integration widgets gave way to API marketplaces, and a surrounding host of related devtest, management, identity and orchestration apps to govern their use. GenAI chatbots and image generators are all the rage today, but AI models are even better at speaking the language of API connections than mastering the complex subtleties of human conversation. For instance, I could talk about intra-enterprise marketplaces that allow IT departments to provision employees and provide platform engineering services to developers, with interdepartmental accounting of the value delivered against budget allocations. As software marketplaces expand to meet future enterprise needs, the most successful ones will hold their vendor communities close, rather than abandon developers or suddenly game the rules against end customers.