Government IT chiefs around the world are following Apple and Salesforce.com by creating cloud-based apps stores:

Vivek Kundra, the US government's CIO, has launched Apps.Gov. Primarily targeted at federal agencies to help reduce the annual $75 billion IT budget, the portal is also open to the public as both buyers and sellers. There are concerns about government favouritism to the suppliers listed, and issues around data security, but most analysts are positive about the flexibility and efficiencies it will create.

Kundra has a successful record in this field: as the District of Columbia's CIO, he launched the DC App Store in 2008, mainly as a crowdsourcing project for software solutions. Part of it included the Apps for Democracy competition, which, claims the DC government, created $2.3 million of value at a cost of $50,000. New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto and Finland are working on similar projects.

The UK government's CIO, John Suffolk, has plans to create the G-AS (Government Apps Store). Although he believes it may only ever be open to the UK public sector because of EU competition laws, it is forecast to save 500m by 2020. As he says in his blog: "The Apple App Store is truly innovative and for me creating something similar has attractions of speed, simplicity, innovation, cost-effectiveness, etc. The combined cloud model and the application store opens up the IT market."