Salesforce.com AppExchange Head Resigns After Short Stint

Next week, Bonvanie will begin his new job as senior vice president of marketing, partnerships and on-demand for Serena Software, an application lifecycle software maker in San Mateo, Calif. The AppExchange team will now report to Salesforce.com Chief Marketing Officer George Hu, a Salesforce.com spokesman said.

Salesforce.com's AppExchange, a platform for partner ISVs to sell add-on applications for Salesforce.com's CRM system, is in the midst of a major expansion push. Shortly before Bonvanie joined the San Francisco-based company in February, Salesforce.com introduced a new revenue model calling for AppExchange partners to pay referral fees of at least 10 percent on first-year revenue from sales influenced by Salesforce.com. At the end of this year it's slated to launch its long-awaited AppExchange checkout system, which will advance AppExchange from a directory to a more fully featured e-commerce system.

Bonvanie came to Salesforce.com as a senior vice president charged with the strategic direction and marketing of AppExchange and Salesforce.com's fledgling Apex on-demand applications development platform. Before joining Salesforce.com, Bonvanie spent a year at SAP as its senior vice president of global marketing. Other past positions include serving as Business Objects chief marketing officer and long stints at Oracle and Ingres.

Bonvanie said his reason for leaving Salesforce.com so soon was simply that opportunity knocked.

"I continue to admire the company and look forward to working with them as a customer and partner in the future," Bonvanie said.

Serena Software presented an irresistible chance to work with a company well-positioned to support application development "in the cloud," Bonvanie said, referring to the growing collection of hosted applications and services accessible through the Web and mobile devices.

"I think Serena is uniquely positioned to deliver a great set of technology to help developers do that," he said. "I look forward to building an ecosystem around it, very much in the same spirit as I did at Salesforce.com." Salesforce.com's AppExchange will be under the microscope this year as partners measure the rewards it offers in return for its steep fees, and financial analysts watch for signs that it will turn into a significant revenue stream for Salesforce.com.

Asked during Salesforce.com's first-quarter earnings call, held in May, about the "considerable investment" the company has made in AppExchange, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said that more than 100 companies have agreed to participate in its referral arrangement. CFO Steve Cakebreak added a disclaimer that "revenue streams are pretty immaterial at the moment because we're just getting that ramped up."