And we’ve found some pretty good ways to do that. We get a good overview of what states, counties and cities are doing every year, and we keep tabs on what new products are coming out and how government is working creatively to solve problems.
But that’s all high-level stuff. What about the deep, turbulent sea that is the Internet’s app stores?
I don’t mean the kind of app store you go to if you want to download a sudoku app. No, I mean the super-businessy app marketplaces. The enterprise app marketplaces.
See, the big cloud computing providers out there all have their own app stores, which largely cater to … well, the kind of people who use cloud computing. Developers. Business leaders. Nonprofits. Government IT folks.
And these app marketplaces are not easy beasts to wrangle. But I took a stab at it.
Gov apps on cloud marketplaces
Infogram
The graphic above shows how many results each marketplace returned when searching for “government.” It’s far from a perfect method for understanding the offerings for government here, but it’s a start. In short, these results begin to show how much functionality there is for the public sector in these marketplaces.
It is by no means a reflection of how useful each app marketplace is for government. There are a lot of caveats. Let’s walk through some of them:
- Not all apps that are useful to government will necessarily say the word “government” in their app store listing, so they won’t show up in this type of search.
- Not all apps that use the word “government” are actually meant to be used by government. For example, the first search result on the AWS marketplace is for a university-focused version of an app that government uses.
- For the life of me I can’t figure out why some of these results showed up in the search at all. Take a look at “360° Real Estate Facility Management” in the Microsoft app store. It’s an app for real-estate owners to manage their properties. It doesn’t include the word “government” anywhere in the description, the reviews or the accompanying documents.
- The marketplaces are built differently. The Azure marketplace is specifically for apps that “(enable) start-ups and independent software vendors (ISVs) to offer their solutions to Azure customers,” while Microsoft AppSource is more general. The IBM Marketplace leans heavily on IBM products, while others are full of third-party apps.
- The way each app store built their search function has a huge influence on the results. For example, Microsoft and AWS both return results that seem mostly relevant to government. But Salesforce and Oracle? Oh boy. Each of them return hundreds of results, and a quick look through some of them does not give me a lot of hope for public-sector relevance. Take a look at “Vision-e Scan” in the Salesforce AppExchange. It’s a program where people can take photos of business cards and load them into Salesforce, auto-filling fields with information from the card photo. Neat! But really not relevant to government. So why did it show up in the search? Well, because in 2015 someone submitted a review for this app where they used the word “governance,” as in the process of managing data. One can imagine that this caused a lot of irrelevant results to end up in the search.
- Meanwhile, Oracle just has endless apps that don’t apply to government but showed up in the search results anyway. What’s more, details for a lot of these apps are so scarce it’s hard to figure out why they wound up in a search for the word “government.” Let’s take a look here: We’ve got “Pharmaceutical channel management solution,” “Aman Insurance Management Solution,” “Pet Cremation System,” “Lite Manufacturing,” and the list goes on.
