Salesforce.com extends its application platform with Force.com
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Saleforce.com looks to make its developer platform a "peer with .Net and Java" with new user interface tools.
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Shares risk with partners Analysis Two companies are driving coverage of on demand business applications this year. Unfortunately for Salesforce.com, it isn't one of them.â¦
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Stealing a page from the Apple iTunes playbook, Salesforce.com announced on Thursday a $0.99 pricing model.The introductory subscription pricing is on a per-log-in basis and is meant to accelerate the adoption of the SaaS (software as a service) ?model into such areas as human resources, employee expense and vacation requests, and job recruiting, where an infrequent usage model would not justify a monthly subscription fee.?In a category like vacation requests, HR may live in that but every employee is not accessing it every day. This is for a new community,? said Ariel Kelman, senior director for platform product marketing.The $0.99 pricing will be good for one year and will rise to $5 per log-in with a maximum five log-ins per user per month starting in 2009.?Salesforce also announced a new Cloud Computing Architecture which Kelman characterized as ?development as a service.?Dubbed the Force.com Development-as-a Service, the technology also includes the year-long .99 cent pricing model and uses the Force.com development platform which will also offer a .99 cent per log in service for developers.Development-as-a-Service will give users a set of development tools in the cloud and a metadata API which so that developers can access code and the database schema.?This is about accessing your definitions of your custom application,? said Kelman.As Kelman describes it, the new service also enables developers to use the Force.com IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which sits in a hosted environment.What Salesforce is doing is adding the other pieces to their Force.com development environment that it needs to appeal to an enterprise audience, said Rebecca Wetteman, vice president of research at Nucleus Research.?The goal with Platform-as-a-Service was to be an on-demand platform developer. Having an API to develop code and having an environment where developers can share, manage, and track code in a collaborative way goes a long way toward attracting those enterprise users,? said Wetteman.Because it is a Web application it also will make collaboration between developers easier. To that end, Salesforce is introducing Force.com Code Share.According to Kelman, when development takes place in the cloud, developers can connect to open source communities. For example, developers can log onto Project Hosting on Google Code and use Code Share to collaborate on building Force.com applications, Kelman said.The Force.com Development-as-a-Service tools are available in developer preview. No date was given for a final version.
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Macromedia promises to speed development of Internet applications with a new tool for its Flex platform. With Flex, enterprises can add interfaces to strategic applications, including visual
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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.com Inc. and Google Inc. announced a strategic global partnership Tuesday, but it wasn't theÂ widely expected tight integrationÂ between Google Apps and Salesforce.com's hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software. Instead, the two vendors brought out their first jointly developed and co-marketed product combining Google AdWords with Salesforce on-demand CRM. [ See Reality Check blog post:Â  Google, Salesforce miss the mark. ] Speculation reached fever pitch in recent weeks that Salesforce.com and Google would integrate their respective hosted applications to counter Microsoft Corp.'s move into on-demand software with its Live applications, which will include a hosted version of its Dynamics CRM offering. There were even suggestions that Google was ready to acquire Salesforce.com. The two companies have a lot in common in terms of their company culture, their technologies and their belief that pay-as-you-go Internet applications will become increasingly popular. "There's a natural fit," said Kendall Collins, senior vice president of marketing at Salesforce.com, of the relationship with Google. The two vendors have been looking at where their businesses intersect and where they could both derive substantial business. They decided to work together on a new offering to target small to midsize businesses (SMBs) and integrate AdWords with Salesforce CRM. AdWords allows companies to advertise their products to people using Google's search engine and to associate their ads with specific keyword searches so the ads may appear next to particular search results. Using the new product, which is called Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, a company can immediately connect to AdWords and create an ad linked to particular search results. Customers clicking on that ad are taken to the company's Web site and encouraged to complete a form with their contact details, which then automatically becomes a new lead in Salesforce CRM. Those leads can then be shared around the company and managed through Salesforce CRM. Users will also be able to link existing AdWords accounts to Salesforce CRM and to create new AdWords accounts, Collins said. Potential customers can try out and then purchase the new product from aÂ special micrositeÂ on the CRM vendor's Web site. The new product will immediately replace Salesforce.com's Team Edition offering, Collins said. It will be available in 14 languages and in the 43 countries where Salesforce.com operates. Under a promotional deal, the new offering will initially cost $600 for a five-user edition per year, as compared with $995 for the five-user Team Edition. The list price will end up as $1,200 per year. For users in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. who are new to AdWords, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords also comes with a $50 AdWords credit. Under the terms of the nonexclusive agreement, Salesforce.com will take 100 percent of the $600 annual subscription fee, while Google will garner the lion's share of the advertising revenue generated, with the CRM vendor receiving a small undisclosed portion of those ad sales. Google's hope is that teaming up with Salesforce.com will enable the company to reach new SMB customers. Salesforce.com's goal is to ensure that all of its CRM offerings have some component of AdWords, Collins said. It's likely that this is the start of an intensification of the Google, Salesforce.com relationship, with perhaps the tight integration of Google Apps and Salesforce CRM to come. "Where will we go next?" Collins asked. "Stay tuned." Â
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Salesforce.com looks to make its developer platform a "peer with .Net and Java" with new user interface tools.
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It's official: Salesforce CRM tools work with Safari on Mac OS X machines.
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Salesforce.com Inc. ,  which has been working with Google Inc.  to make its  Web-based software applications meld with Google's own software  push, said on Tuesday it is enabling its customers to sell  Google advertising through Salesforce business software.
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NEW YORK - Hosted CRM (customer relationship management) evangelist Salesforce.com Inc. began a new branding campaign this week to draw attention to its customer-service support functionality, launching a new Web site at Supportforce.com and announcing a batch of partnerships with top call center infrastructure vendors.
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InfoWorld - eBay this week is expanding its developers program, providing a single API schema to link to the e-commerce vendor&#8217;s site and adding other resources.
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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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Blog: Salesforce.com throws a confections change up, with similar results to Pavlov's dog.
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InfoWorld - Adobe&#39;s ColdFusion software for building Internet applications and Web sites is being improved with Microsoft .Net support, enabling .Net objects to be invoked from within the ColdFusion language.
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Software maker Salesforce.com Inc. said it reached an agreement with Google to make Web-based software applications that help businesses improve sales and marketing.
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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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SEPTEMBER 29, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Hosted CRM evangelist Salesforce.com Inc. began a new branding campaign this week to draw attention to its customer service support functionality, launching a new Web
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TechWeb - The new software will be available for customers and hosting partners to download online. CRM 4.0's multitenant architecture gives the company and hosting partners the ability to host CRM in much higher volumes, setting the stage for a showdown with Salesforce.com.