By Brian K. Walker
Earlier this week, Demandware announced their new Link program. This program enables Demandware to make it relatively easy to add many SaaS-based point solutions to their clients’ sites in a pre-integrated fashion. The list includes Cybersource, Bazaarvoice, Baynote, PayPal, among many others. In today’s eCommerce technology environment it is extremely common to integrate various third-party technologies with the eCommerce platform for a variety of reasons – from payments to search to recommendations to content – and increasingly these third party applications are being delivered through services which must be integrated first to receive data to use on behalf of their client or to deliver their service. This integration may not be overly burdensome or complex, but it takes away from other resource needs and may limit a company’s experimentation with various tools and capabilities.  The Link program gets at the heart of what SaaS platforms have promised for some time, and it is a great to see a platform provider move forward by investing in this. By implementing what we could consider in some ways an “app store for the enterprise eCommerce business” Demandware has certainly innovated here.
Why Link matters: