Elisa, Appelsiini and the One Software Store to Buy them All

Sadly, Finland is in the middle of something we could call an economic time out. Large companies are laying off employees and revenues tend to look grimmer than usual. In terms of employment and the flow of money, eyes are increasingly turning towards SME’s, which are still plenty, regardless of the difficult circumstances.

Among these SME’s are a good deal of software companies. Since nowadays software is required pretty much everywhere, it would make sense that these SW SME’s sell their products to other SME’s who need them. However, in order to get the best value for their product, these companies spend their limited sales department resources to focus on the big corporations. See the flaw?

Elisa is what you call a big corporation, but they’re among the ones who are picking up pace in order stay on the tracks of the digital era. In 2010 they acquired Appelsiini, a startup through which Elisa is to launch a new app and service store for startups (rumours say this will happen on the coming 4th of June).

In order to expand their product repertoire, Elisa and Appelsiini are hunting for software developers to import their creations into the Elisa web app store.

This means SW startups can take advantage of Elisa’s large scale marketing channel through which they can boost their sales in market segments they wouldn’t usually have the time to focus on. Think about it: Elisa is well known, has a strong foothold in Finland and deals all over the country. It’s a setting, and most importantly an potential client audience most startups haven’t quite reached yet.

But a deal like this always comes with a catch, though in this case it’s quite a straightforward one: a 30% cut goes to Elisa for every sale completed through their platform. It’s still decent slice from a pie that could’ve been entirely out of reach.

In addition to the Appelsiini store, SW importation can get plugged into AppDirect, an even wider “app store” marketplace for web apps, sold by American operators like AT&T as well as other cooperation from Swisscom and Deutche Telecom.

Sari Kola-Nyström, VP of Strategy & Innovation at Appelsiini told us they’ve been very happy working for Elisa, as so far they’ve had the liberty of growing without any loss of agility. She feels it’s important to create a single location where startups can get their software from, since these startups end up buying the software anyway, whether it’s from Appelsiini or from Amazon.

Appelsiini will be seen on Arctic15: Exit Path main stage during the second day, where they will hold a reverse pitch among other big players like PayPal, Fonecta, GE Healthcare, Spinverse and Facebook .