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Archer Technologies on Tuesday launched the Archer Exchange, a virtual marketplace for on-demand application development wherein companies that have developed applications in-house can put them up on the exchange for sale to other corporations.
The company made the announcement at the RSA Security Conference (Nasdaq: RSAS), being held through Friday at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center.
Enterprises getting applications from the exchange will find it reduces application development time because they only have to tweak the applications to meet their particular in-house needs, Jon Darbyshire, president and CEO of Archer Technologies, told TechNewsWorld.
"Some people refer to this colloquially as a form of rapid application development," he said.
Readying for Sale
Applications submitted are vetted by Archer Labs, a division of parent company Archer Technologies. "They clean up the applications and tweak them, and they do such a good job that sometimes the companies that submitted them buy the tweaked version for their own use," Darbyshire said.
Companies such as American Express (NYSE: AXP) and Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) are among those uploading applications to the exchange. Currently, the exchange offers 60 applications; that will go up to "100 to 150 within six to eight months," Darbyshire said.
These will all be from large enterprises, as Archer focuses on Fortune 1,000 companies and counts 47 of the 50 largest U.S. financial companies and the seven largest U.S. telecommunications carriers among its clients.
The Back Story
Darbyshire got the idea after seeing that Archer Technologies' customers had developed 700 applications using Archer's framework. "Our product is an enterprise compliance and risk management framework, but there were all these other applications being developed using it," he said.
The framework has seven core areas: Sarbanes-Oxley compliance management; policy management; threat management; asset management; risk management; incident management; and vendor management.
It runs on a Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) SQL back end and .NET.
Customer-built applications using the framework include customer 
relationship management, media and analyst briefing tracking, mergers and acquisitions, and just about anything else you can think of.
Archer Technologies uses its own framework. "We run our entire company, except for accounting, on our framework," Darbyshire said. "We eat our own dog food."
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