Apparently Salesforce.com was in the UK yesterday pushing their attempt to cultivate an ecosystem of ISVs (sic) and developers building collaborative business applications on top of the salesforce.com CRM platform. The idea, I surmise, is that salesforce.com provides the horizontal, cross-industry CRM services as part of a web-based SOA - other organisations build vertically oriented services on top to an API, and everything is on-demand. I think it is an agressive but entirely sensible play. Microsoft and Oracle have done well out of strategies that extend opportunity out to the wider developer community and Google has made a lot of similar moves over the past two years reaching out to developers.

So how do a series of CRM AppExchanges (aka Hubs) around the globe interact with all the existing procurement and sourcing based hubs already in place around the world? Clearly CRM, sourcing, trading, and collaboration are all part of the same supply chain management problem set.