Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff has unveiled an online marketplace for hosted enterprise applications.

AppExchange allows enterprises and individual developers to sell or exchange applications built on Salesforce's Appforce service, which in turn uses the firm's hosted CRM product.

The marketplace currently holds several dozen applications made available by Salesforce and other software vendors.

AppExchange further extends Benioff's vision of creating an online, hosted platform for enterprise applications similar to Windows today.

Most of the platform would be invisible to the end user, who would use a browser window to access the application.

During his opening keynote at the Dreamforce user event in San Francisco, Benioff referred to the exchange as "the eBay of applications" and described it as an "iTunes music store for online applications ".