Salesforce.com gets closer to 'iTunes' vision
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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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Apple bears the ultimate responsibility for making iTunes compatible with rival music players, says the agency leading a European effort to make it happen. By the Associated Press.
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The launch of the Microsoft digital-music store takes direct aim at Apple Computer&#39;s dominant iTunes service, setting off a battle of the bands between the online music sellers and their rock-star frontmen -- Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
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The Washington Post&#39;s Rob Pegoraro says that Microsoft&#39;s new MSN Music store is the most capable iTunes competitor, but that it falls &quot;just short&quot; of Apple&#39;s offering.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Salesforce.com (Quote, Chart) CEO Marc Benioff is hoping to do to call centers and help desks what he has accomplished in the CRM space.
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(InfoWorld) - Everyone knows Salesforce.com as the company that pioneered SaaS (software as a service) and survived the dot-com bust when many other ASPs didn't. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff says the company is ready to take on MicrosoftÂ as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as "Salesforce.com 2.0" in New York on Tuesday. Promoting its hosted application infrastructure as a platform for application development is not a new strategy for Salesforce.com, but the company seems to be turning up the volume on the message. At Tuesday's event, Benioff unveiledÂ a new hosted application called Wealth Management EditionÂ for the financial services industry and an increase in users from 5,000 to 25,000 at customer Merrill Lynch. But he also used the event to vigorously promote the company's transition from an ASP to a hosted application platform for partners. As the company approaches its eighth anniversary next month, Benioff said it's important that Salesforce.com think about achieving its first-decade goals over the next two years. Becoming a hosted platform for other ISVs -- many of whom don't have the financial resources to build applications on their own -- is at the top of the list, he said. "That's very much what we're doing today when we talk about Salesforce 2.0," he said. "Our vision started with our killer applications -- a whole new way to deliver enterprise software. Next we had very successful customers ... [then] it moved to the developer community to add on to that, and then it really got into a platform to give our customers and developers the ability to extend these products and create new products on the same infrastructure." Benioff described how Salesforce.com set up a collocation facility in San Mateo, California, for companies that need application infrastructure. There are 32 ISVs in the facility now with a waiting list for when the company expands the project, he said. This kind of facility, combined with the ability for ISVs to build applications on Salesforce.com's Apex platform for free will drive the company's success as a platform provider, Benioff said. ISVs will be able to post those applications on Salesforce.com's AppExchange directory and sell them on its AppStore. The transition from being a straight SaaS provider to having all these new offerings can be confusing, said Laura Lederman, an analyst with William Blair & Co. in Chicago. Pulling it all together as a cohesive platform under the Salesforce.com 2.0 moniker should spur wider understanding and adoption by customers, she said. Moving into the platform space will put Salesforce.com directly in the path of its favorite nemesis, Microsoft. Benioff, outspoken as usual, said Microsoft's model of still requiring customers to install their own software instead of hosting it on the Web is "really screwed up." He said he tried to update his computer to Windows Vista but was unsuccessful because it was too complicated. Benioff also insisted Salesforce.com has no desire to compete with its partners -- something for which Microsoft has been criticized -- even as it ventures into the vertical hosted applications space. "We want to foster competition on the AppExchange," he said. "If we build a [customer] recruiting application, we want other people to do that, too. We want the best [applications] to rise to the top."
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Salesforce.comÂ is starting to provide some details about the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, including the product's primary focus, which will be customization.
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p2pnet.net News:- Apple&#39;s pre-eminence in the corporate online music retail market is about to be seriously threatened. Slightly more than a year ago, Bill and the Boyz said they were planning to develop something similar to Apple&#39;s iTunes - only better.
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Everyone knows Salesforce.com Inc. as the company that pioneered software as a service (SAAS) and survived the dot-com bust when many other application service providers (ASPs) didn't. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said the company is ready to take on Microsoft Corp. as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as "Salesforce.com 2.0" in New York on Tuesday.
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Microsoft Corp. launched a new online store for music downloads on Wednesday, taking direct aim at Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iTunes music service.
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Blog: Salesforce.com, SugarCRM find bones to pick with Microsoft's depiction of its hosted Live CRM plans.
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InfoWorld - Hosted CRM service provider Salesforce.com took another step forward last week in its strategy to build an online ecosystem of vendors that offer software as a service.
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Continuing the thread from yesterday. I got absolutely nowhere, some people suggested I use a smart playlist, missing the point that I'm a developer working on a podcatcher, not a user trying to use iTunes as a podcatcher. I'm sure it's an excellent way to subscribe to podcasts, but I have my own ideas how podcatchers should work, and I want to integrate them with other stuff I'm working on. Integrating with iTunes is proving to be quite a challenge, or maybe it's an art, we'll see.  As usual Mac users are superior sumbitches.  (Quoting the James Brolin character the first time we meet him in the third season finale of The West Wing.) Anyway, the search continues, I tried another more direct tack, and looked for glue for iTunes for UserLand, and bingo, there's a match, from 2001, a well-known Frontier programmer Sean Elfstrom, apparently converted glue for the Sonic SoundJam app that iTunes used to be, before Apple acquired it.  I installed the glue in the OPML Editor. It's daunting, for sure, but let's see what I can get working.
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Microsoft's MSN Music store is by far the most capable rival to Apple's iTunes Music Store, even if it doesn't yet surpass it.-Rob Pegoraro
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Apple's iTunes Store dominates the digital music retail scene--can it do the same with online movie rentals?
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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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Class libraries in, execs out Salesforce.com will next month release its Apex programming language to developers hungry to mash-up web-based business applications with its "platform in the sky" and to reassure investors anxious about growth.â¦