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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Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.The customer support initiative does three things: Extends for five years the time over which Microsoft will support its products; offers more creative financing solutions for buying its CRM and ERP products, and promises to create a more transparent environment for its channel partners and their customers about future upgrades and products.Industry analyst Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, said the fact that Microsoft is offering an additional five years of software support is in recognition of how well Oracle's extended support program is working for its customer base.Under the new Microsoft program there will be a total of five years of "mainstream" support for its products plus an additional five years of extended support, according to Christine Bell, director of global services product management, for Microsoft Business Solutions.Greenbaum says the extended support is a smart move on Microsoft's part."Oracle found out that extending support for their applications does not mean customers are gong to stall on [buying] new releases. They [Oracle] have a good upgrade flow despite or maybe because of extended support," Greenbaum said.In today's market, most vendors make upgrades a revenue-neutral event."You still get maintenance revenue either way, so why cause anxiety when you don't have to," added Greenbaum.On the financing side, Microsoft is now offering more options, including financing both the cost of hardware and software.Also available through March 2008 is a program called Smart Pay which will allow customers to select what their monthly payments will be for the first year.Finally, Bell said that Microsoft is making the commitment to deliver statements of directions that look out to the next 12 to 14 months."It will be very specific and talk about features and functionality," said Bell.Microsoft will include written documents on a special partner and customer Web site and will not require signing a non-disclosure agreement.The roadmap details are expected to start in November.
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It's different, but better. Oh yes... SAP has doled out a handful of details on A1S, its eagerly anticipated mid-market on-demand suite, while promising to be better than Salesforce.com.â¦
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Business software maker Salesforce.com Inc.  said on Tuesday it would help other companies market their software products on its Web site and charge commissions on sales generated by the new service.
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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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(InfoWorld) - In a deal that makes both companies look good, Salesforce.com announced that Omniture, one of the leaders in online Web marketing analytics, will be the newest service to join AppExchange. AppExchange is theSalesforce.com platform that allows third-party ISVs to integrate their applications with Salesforce CRM.Â  For its part, Salesforce gets Omniture Closed Loop Marketing for Salesforce, a service that will bring to its site marketing executives, a group that up until now had no compelling reason to use Salesforce. "Salesforce is typically a tool used by sales executives," said John Lovett, senior analyst, Web Site Technologies & Operations at Jupiter Research. From an Omniture point of view, the company will now be able to expose its capabilities to a far larger audience, which will put the company in a good position to sell even more marketing analytic services than what will be currently offered on the AppExchange site. For example, neither Genesis, a service that allows companies to integrate their online marketing applications, nor SiteCatalyst, which focuses on visitor site behavior, will be offered on AppExchange. Omniture's appeal comes from its ability to allow marketers to track different aspects of multiple marketing campaigns and to attribute credit to numerous campaigns leading up to a sale or a conversion, says Lovett. "Previously, one campaign would get the credit for a sale even when it may have been the combined result of two or three campaigns," said Lovett. The pain point Omniture solves, according to both Gail Ennis, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Omniture and Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce, is in tearing down the wall that exists between sales and marketing. "It has been hard for these two organizations to come together to deliver effective marketing campaigns," said Kelman. Reporting capabilities will be available through both Salesforce or Omniture dashboards or through mashups between the services. Omniture Closed Loop Marketing for Salesforce is available now. Pricing starts at $2,500 per month for unlimited users.
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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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Enhancements to Eclipse-based IDE are designed to bring traditional source code and testing tools to hosted Force.com platform.
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New features of the Apex programming language will allow customers more connections with other vendors' applications.
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Salesforce.com repackages Apex code as developer 'platform' Software as a Service (SaaS) isn't dead, but it could soon be overtaken by Platform as a Service (PaaS), according to SaaS pioneer Salesforce.com.â¦
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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.
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Salesforce.com and Google team up, launch small-business tool that combines Google AdWords with Salesforce.com on-demand CRM.
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Among the factors sited: the ability to customize the software and avoid vendor lock-in.
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Release makes use of technology from CodeWeavers to let customers run applications from Microsoft.
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With its eye firmly fixed on rival Salesforce.com, Siebel unveiled OnDemand Release 6 of its hosted CRM suite of applications last week, the first industry-specific version of its hosted software.
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InfoWorld - Business Objects has started to roll out a full suite of business intelligence (BI) software in the form of an online service, initially for customers using Salesforce.com applications.
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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.