Brief: Salesforce.com pushes on development, integration
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NOVEMBER 03, 2004  - On-demand CRM software provider Salesforce.com Inc. is branching out to offer hosted application development technology and online marketplace services to supplement its own software services.
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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE  SAN FRANCISCO - Online software pioneer Salesforce.com Inc. will help Internet search leader Google Inc. sell ads as part of a partnership that falls short of Wall Street's anticipation since word of the alliance leaked last month.
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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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One big challenge, analysts say: building a developer base and overall ecosystem for its products.
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Whoo oo oo ooo... Can you feel the force? Dreamforce Chief executive Marc Benioff today kicked-off Salesforce.com's fifth, annual Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco by citing customer numbers, growing developer and partner channels, and increased revenues as proof that Salesforce.com will force its way onto the software industry's table.â¦
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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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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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Blog: Salesforce.com is hosting a news conference to announce a partnership with an unnamed Internet company and TechCrunch speculates the partner will be Google.
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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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SAN FRANCISCO -- At the Dreamforce 2004 Salesforce.com user conference on Monday, the company that says "just say no to packaged applications" continued to expand on its strategy of tightly integrating its hosted solution with in-house enterprise applications.
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InfoWorld - Next Monday, Salesforce.com will, in the words of one industry analyst, &quot;extend the value proposition of software as a service&quot; when it introduces Visualforce at its Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco.
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com September 13, 2004, 7:51 AM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half.
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(InfoWorld) - Claiming Bloomberg and the Bloomberg TerminalÂ  lock customers in with a proprietary workstation and software accessed on an archaic keyboard, and that Bloomberg offers a deep but very narrow selection of financial feeds, Salesforce.com will announce on Tuesday a competitive Wealth Management EditionÂ  of its SaaS (Software as a Service) application for use by wealth management professionals. Salesforce.com will also announce that Merrill LynchÂ  will deploy the Wealth Management Edition to its 25,000 financial advisors. In addition, the company is partnering with Cisco SystemsÂ  to deploy a VoIP phone with the wealth management solution for dialing customers within the context of the application.Â  The major benefit to professionals using the Salesforce wealth management system is its integration capabilities of customer information with data services in real time, according to Kendall CollinsÂ , senior vice president, product marketingÂ  at Salesforce. Contextual relevance between market news and customers owning shares in a stock that is suddenly showing signs of movement would allow a manager to pull up a list of all clients who have a holding or interest in that stock and take an action, such as send an email, or execute a standing buy or sell order.Â  According to Collins, Bloomberg is unable to match that capability. "Bloomberg has moved slowly with the Internet," Collins said. But the question is whether or not Bloomberg is to Kodak as Salesforce is to digital photography? Denis PombriantÂ , principal at Beagle ResearchÂ , thinks so. Pombriant says a similar comparison could be made with any disruptive technology, minis and mainframes, PCs and minis. "The problem for anyone being disrupted is they have a huge sunk cost in their existing products. However, it is a question of whether or not they want to do a creative destruction of their own product or have somebody else do it for them," Pombriant said. The Wealth Management Edition will be delivered on the same upgrade and release schedule as other Salesforce products. The new application is still part of its multi-tenant architecture and is based at code level on one executable, Collins said.Â  Salesforce hopes to leverage the fact that the financial services market is fairly fragmented. With over 3.8 million financial advisors, Bloomberg has the largest market share with only 240,000 Bloomberg workstations deployed. The Salesforce wealth management system was co-designed with Merrill Lynch. Pombriant called the announcement significant, pointing out that it is the first concrete demonstration that the SaaS platform is real and that the so-called long tail of SaaS is not just about smaller applications or applets. "We are talking about a big sophisticated application that companies typically built in-house because they couldnât find the expertise from vendors," Pombriant said. Salesforce will continue to roll out additional solutions for the financial services industry, including a Banking Edition, Capital Markets, Insurance, and Mortgage editions, Collins said. The Wealth Management Edition will be priced at $500 per user, per month and will be available in the third quarter.
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Hoping to find the same success in the contact center as it found with the sales force, Salesforce.com today added Supportforce.com to its application arsenal.
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Software maker promises that the sales force automation revamp will help sales processes by pulling in more data.
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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.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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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.