Salesforce.com Adds WebSphere to Sforce

Salesforce.com Inc. announced Wednesday a new offering that extends its sforce hosted application development environment to IBMs WebSphere application server.

The new hosted service offering, dubbed the sforce Toolkit for IBM WebSphere, allows developers to use IBMs WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Studio Application Developer to build extensions to Salesforce.com that integrate customer data stored at Salesforce.com with other applications in the customers environment.

sforce has worked in a similar fashion with BEA Systems Inc.s WebLogic application server and development tools from Sun Microsystems Inc., Borland Inc. and Microsoft Corp. since its inception last summer.

The sforce Toolkit for WebSphere includes the sforce Object Browser for WebSphere, which provides access to sforce Objects, schema definition and configuration information from within WebSphere Application Studio Designer; sforce API reference documentation within WebSphere Application Studio Designer; and J2EE code examples of common customer relationship management integration and extension scenarios.

Salesforce.com also announced Wednesday a planned integration with Sybase Inc.s Sybase IQ and Replication Server products that will allow companies to analyze their Salesforce.com customer data in Sybase IQ to spot business trends that could affect their sales and marketing efforts.

In other news, Salesforce.com announced that it has reached the 9,000-customer mark while securing its largest customer installation yet, more than 2,000 seats at SunTrust Banks Inc. The San Francisco-based company also welcomed Sun executive Pat Sueltz to the fold.

Sueltz, who had been the head of Suns computer services business, will become Salesforce.coms president of marketing, technology and systems, effective immediately.