Salesforce.com Slips Despite Subscriber Growth
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BusinessWeek Online - Salesforce.com  has the growth story down pat, but keeping up the pace can get tricky as competitors toughen your game. Investors sold Salesforce stock on Feb. 22 - even after news that the on-demand software services company won a whopping 90,000 net new subscribers during the three months ended Jan. 31.
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(Corrects headline to show Web traffic growth, not Web sales, fell on Black Friday)
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Seeking to diversify beyond its sales-force-automation roots, Salesforce.com on Wednesday introduced a new on-demand call center and help desk application service called Supportforce.
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The e-commerce company said it continued to grow quickly, but analysts have been closely watching the companyâs auction business for signs of slowing.
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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.comÂ plans to widen the capabilities of its AppExchange Web site in 2007 to more closely resembles the online presence already established by companies such as Apple Computer and eBay. At an event due to take place Tuesday in San Francisco, the on-demand vendor will lift the curtain on work already underway at the company to turn AppExchange into a fully functioning online marketplace for hosted software. The idea is to make it asÂ easy for customers to buy on-demand softwareÂ from AppExchange as it is to purchase songs from Apple's iTunes music store, according to Kendall Collins, senior vice president of product marketing at Salesforce.com. Ever since Salesforce.comÂ officially launched AppExchangeÂ in January, there's been a question mark as to how the company will generate significant revenue from the service, he said. The site showcases both Salesforce.com and third-party hosted applications To date, AppExchange has functioned mostly as a central place where users of Salesforce.com's hosted software can go to find and try related applications and tools provided by the company, independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers. When a customer wants to buy a vendor's application, they have to individually contract with that company, meaning small development shops have had to provide the necessary infrastructure themselves to deal with selling, invoicing and deploying their products. Next year, Salesforce.com will make those capabilities available to any of its partners willing to pay for the services through an initiative the company's dubbed AppStore. There are several planned AppStore components. The AppStore Standard Referral Program will be available in February 2007, followed in August by AppStore Premium Referral Program and then AppStore Checkout in December next year. The Referral programs provide partners with access to Salesforce.com's marketing services, while the Checkout service will give them access to online ordering, billing, invoicing and collection services. Partners using Checkout will pay Salesforce.com 20 percent of the first year's revenue they obtain from any sale they close through AppExchange and the same percentage for subsequent years. The Referral services will work out at 10 percent of the first year's revenue of a sale for the standard version and 25 percent for the premium version, with nothing to pay in subsequent years. Checkout is a very significant development project for Salesforce.com, Collins said, essentially committing the company to take all the services and infrastructure it uses to run its own business and making those capabilities available to any of its partners worldwide. The vendor is already testing a prototype of the service able to handle multiple currencies and languages along with local sales tax requirements with some of its partners and developers. The prototype features single sign-on technology and includes an option for customers to purchase more Salesforce software licenses as they're buying AppExchange applications. Customers can also renew and upgrade their AppExchange subscriptions as well as purchase add-on technologies.
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Ad costs hit bottom line but subscriptions grow.
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Salesforce.com is drawing particular attention to the analyticsÂ customization capabilitiesÂ it plans to offer in the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, known as Salesforce Winter '07.
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United Online Inc. , a low-cost Internet service provider, on Monday reported disappointing growth in quarterly revenue and subscribers, and cut its full-year subscriber target for the second time in three months, sending shares as much as 7 percent lower.
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Ziff Davis - Revenue for the quarter of &#36;11.2 million, compared with &#36;20.1 million in the year-ago quarter, dropped in part because of dwindling SCOsource licensing revenue&#151;but SCO's CEO says the company is "steadfast on a dual path for success."
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Watson Wyatt serves its clients very well. Problem is, the company can't ramp up its growth rate.
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Plus: Salesforce quarterly revenue rises...Write-downs widen DirecTV's loss...Time Warner net income slips...Cell phone unit shores up Verizon.
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Companies like Google and Yahoo that control major online advertising networks have not met their pledge to aggressively ferret-out click fraud among their affiliate partners, driving growth of the problem across the entire Web industry, according to new research estimates.Click Forensics -- an independent click fraud monitoring and reporting service that markets itself as an online version of the TV industry's Nielsen ratings system -- released its latest statistics tracking Internet advertising trends on Friday, and the group reported that the issue of fraudulent ad traffic continues thrive on the Web.According to the company, roughly 16.2 percent of all online ad clicks were derived via click fraud during the third quarter of 2007 compared to a rate of 13.8 percent for the same period during 2006 and up from 15.8 percent of all traffic during the second quarter of this year.Even more concerning, Click Forensics leaders said, is the report's finding that the average rate of click fraud -- most often carried out by software programs designed to mimic legitimate traffic -- continues to rise on major search engine networks, including Google's AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network.Fraudulent traffic accounted for 28.1 percent of all ad hits on such networks during the third quarter of 2007 compared to 25.6 percent for the second quarter of this year and 21.9 percent for the first three months of the calendar, Click Forensics contends.The research company also reported that more than 60 percent of all ad traffic coming from so-called parked domains -- typically used solely to funnel traffic to advertisers -- was observed as being fraudulent during the third quarter of 2007.Tom Cuthbert, chief executive of Click Forensics, said that as a result of the negative impact that click fraud is having on Web advertising as a whole -- in that it undermines the legitimacy of all Internet ad traffic -- both publishers and advertisers are feeling a pinch.Ad publishers are seeing a diminishing of their network traffic quality, said Cuthbert, while advertisers are seeing their conversion rates "drop significantly" on content networks and are pulling back some of their spending as a result, he said."The issue of click fraud on these major networks is becoming a real problem for advertisers, and increasingly, they are choosing to stay away and look into other alternatives," Cuthbert said. "The big guys are not doing a better job of policing themselves; both Google and Yahoo have tools for advertisers to opt-out of suspected click fraud sites, but the vast majority of advertisers are not doing so, and the tools are too hard to use."Cuthbert said that the major network providers have promised to cooperate with efforts to drive down automated ad clicks and other forms of fraud but have not followed through on their promises."We've asked the search engines to work with us to improve the situation, and they've said yes, but here we are 18 months later, and we've seen no movement in that area, which is frustrating for us and for advertisers as a whole," said Cuthbert. "So far, we've had a great process of discussion, but we're really hoping to see them act on those ideas."Ideally, Click Forensics -- which claims to derive its figures from statistics provided by 4,000 advertisers and agencies participating in its Click Fraud Network consortium -- would like to serve as an objective third party that is used as a clearinghouse for identifying online ad fraud, much as Nielsen provides rating figures for the TV industry.Without such an entity, the ad networks continue to hold most of the cards, leaving advertisers at a disadvantage, he said."There needs to be better communication and sharing of data. We have information about traffic that these guys don't have, such as conversion data and other things from the actual advertisers, that they're very skeptical to give to Google or Yahoo," said Cuthbert. "Ultimately, we believe that the first provider to embrace this third-party model we're proposing will have a significant advantage over its rivals."Google disputes Click Forensics' figures Yahoo representatives didn't immediately return calls seeking comment on the Click Forensics report, but Google officials countered that Click Forensics' estimates don't accurately represent the company's own click fraud statistics.While Click Forensics has its 4,000 partners, the search giant claims to view a far broader and detailed swath of ad traffic, giving it a more comprehensive perspective. Google has consistently questioned the legitimacy of Click Forensics' figures since the company began issuing its reports in 2006."These estimates have never reflected the invalid click rates we see at Google; Click Forensics has consistently been one of the highest estimates our there with numerous serious methodology problems, and, as such, we rarely get asked about them these day," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for the Trust &amp; Safety group at Google.Ghosemajumder said that Google offers "significantly more transparency" into its click fraud efforts and provides more traffic quality tools for advertisers than any of its rivals."We plan to do even more in the future," he said.Among the measures that Google has employed to help advertisers thwart click fraud were the launch of new IP exclusion and Placement Performance Reports in June, tools that Ghosemajumder labeled as unique features in the industry.The IP exclusion tool is meant to allow advertisers to specify IP addresses they want to avoid with their ads and builds on the site exclusion feature the company introduced in 2005, which allows advertisers to prohibit specific URLs from showing their content.The Placement Performance Reports are designed to give advertisers the ability to view which sites are performing the best among those displaying their content, which specifically arms the companies with the opportunity to use the site exclusion and site targeting tools drive out any apparent fraud, Google said.In August, the search giant also launched an Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, which is meant to offer a single place where advertisers can access all of Google's click fraud resources.Some smaller search providers believe that they can begin winning advertisers' business away from their larger rivals by providing stronger methods of fighting click fraud.Daniel Yomtobian, chief executive of ABCSearch, said that his company has begun luring large, well-known advertisers like VeriSign away from other venues with a tool dubbed ClickShield, which promises to profile advertising affiliate behavior to give its customers better insight into just how their content is being distributed.Yomtobian points out that Click Defense, an online marketing firm that offers independent click fraud detection services, recently charted his company's traffic as having less than 5 percent fraudulent ad hits."As an industry we can't burden the advertisers and can't burden the users, as ad networks we all need to do a better job and police affiliates to drive down fraud," he said. "A lot of our competitors talk about their technologies to fight this problem, but a lot of that work is merely basic click fraud-blocking; by going above and beyond, we feel that we can grow our business based on delivery of a lower rate of unwanted traffic."
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Customer list laid bare Salesforce.com has been caught with its pants down after phishers persuaded an employee to hand over customer contact details.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.com on Tuesday unveiled a new version of its hosted customer relationship management service, which it said will add a new portal and workflow management capabilities and ease the process of writing and testing new custom applications. The new version of the service comes just days after Microsoft introduced its much anticipatedÂ entryÂ into the hosted CRM business. The 23rd version of the Salesforce.com service lets users access the company's proprietary Apex Code programming language to customize their CRM applications or write new ones to run on Salesforce.com servers, the company said. "Customers can write code that runs on our servers -- it's programming without software," said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, in a statement. The company said that Apex Code is similar to the widely used Java language and that applications written using it can be accessed via Web standards such as XML or SOAP. The new version also adds what Salesforce.com calls Intelligent Workflow, which will allow users to add rules to business processes. A new on-demand Customer Portal can deliver Web 2.0 collaborative content to customers, the company said. The Intelligent Workflow capability will come in handy at Salesforce.com customerÂ Enviance, an on-demand environmental regulation compliance software provider based in Carlsbad, Calif., said Michele Hincks, vice president of marketing at the company. Enviance has been running Salesforce.com since 2004 for sales, marketing and customer service, but the workflow management capabilities have thus far been very rudimentary, she said. The workflow tool will allow the company to use custom fields help process new customers and perform other tasks, Hincks said. She also said she expects that marketing personnel at Enviance will be able to use Apex Code to custom-build applications, so they will no longer have to wait for IT programmers to get to such projects. "It seems it will be more usable," she said. "I can cut and paste code myself." Mike Epner, vice president of worldwide services and support at Borland Software, said that his firm will create several new applications to run on the Salesforce.com platform. In addition, Borland plans to use the new version's portal to deliver technical support content to Borland customers. "The new release continues the evolution from software as a service to platform as a service," said Denis Pombriant, analyst at Beagle Research Group LLC. "Platform as a service enables CIOs to concentrate less on keeping their infrastructures running while spending more time on deriving business benefits for their companies." The new version of Salesforce.com, called Summer '07, will be available in August.
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(InfoWorld) - Next Monday, Salesforce.com will, in the words of one industry analyst, "extend the value proposition of software as a service" when it introduces Visualforce at its Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco. The Visualforce layer introduces the user interface as a service. Visualforce is the latest component of Salesforce.com's Platform-as-a-Service, which the company announced earlier this summer as Force.com. Other components include the database and logic portions. Visualforce will allow Salesforce.com customers to design custom application interfaces while incorporating other technologies such as HTML, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and Adobe Flex. The company made the move following requests from customers who wanted to present a more diverse UI, rather than creating applications that had a similar look and feel to the Salesforce.com CRM, according to Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce.com. Doug Menefee, CIO at The Schumacher Group, sounded quite enthusiastic about what he could do with Visualforce, although he hadn't used it yet. "By being able to build applications utilizing Visualforce, we will be able to build custom interfaces that improve workflow and productivity for data-entry-intensive job functions," said Menefee. Menefee was also pleased about the opportunity to build wizards in Visualforce. According to Jeff Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies, with each user conference, Salesforce adds another layer of value to SaaS (software as a service). Up until now, customization has been a thorn in the side of SaaS. It has been a topic of concern and criticism by SaaS skeptics, said Kaplan. "This new feature and capability is a clear indication of how quickly the SaaS industry is evolving to permit customization. And it is another example [of] how those misconceptions of the past are continually being eroded by these developments," Kaplan said. Menefee said that Visualforce will allow his organization to apply best practices to user interface design in various applications. This, in turn, will let them customize the employee experience based on their needs for data entry or viewing. Visualforce uses a "page-based model" built on current Web presentation technology and adds a component library for incorporating common interface elements. The UI platform tool leverages the data, logic, and workflow capabilities found in the greater Force.com platform. Among the features included in Visualforce are the following: * Pages, which allow developers to create pages using standard Web technologies. * Components, which allow companies to assemble current user interface elements in a new UI. * Logic Controllers for creating user interface behavior. Visualforce will be available for developer preview next week and generally available in the fourth quarter.
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TechWeb - Salesforce.com introduced tools to integrate its customer relationship management service with enterprise resource planning systems, Oracle 11i, and technology from 25 partners.
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roundup Plus: CA adds utility-like mainframe pricing, expects...Salesforce.com reports subscriber surge...RealNetworks signs up Red Flag Linux.