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Salesforce.com ushered in its annual Dreamforce conference with a slew of announcements, including partnerships with key platform companies such as Facebook and Amazon.com, enhancements to its Force.com platform, and enhancements to its core CRM solution.
At Dreamforce in San Francisco, Salesforce.com, which refers to itself as “the enterprise cloud computing company,” announced to thousands of its users and developers that its Salesforce CRM Winter ’09 release has gone live. And with more than 50 new features, Salesforce CRM Winter ’09 enables customers to manage their customer interactions across sales, marketing and customer service. Salesforce CRM is built on the Force.com platform.
Company officials said Salesforce CRM is helping more than 47,700 enterprises and 1.1 million subscribers better serve their customers without any of the cost, risk or complexity of traditional, on-premises software.
Meanwhile, for developers, Salesforce.com delivered the Force.com IDE (integrated development environment) for Winter ’09. In an interview with eWEEK, Peter Coffee, director of platform research at Salesforce.com, cited the new IDE as one of many highlights for developers among the Dreamforce announcements.
And in a blog post, John Plax, a Salesforce.com staff blogger, described the Force.com IDE as “a powerful client application for developing, testing and deploying Force.com applications.”
According to Plax, the Winter ’09 release of the Force.com IDE contains the following major new features:
- New Metadata Support in Winter ’09 includes new Analytics and Translation Workbench components, an expanded Custom Object definition, Apex class templates, and more.
- Metadata Component Directory displays a complete list of the metadata components in your organization available for downloading into your Force.com project.
- Simpler Project Structure removes package folders, so metadata components are easier to find and synchronize regardless of what packages they are in.
- Documentation and User Assistance adds 40 new IDE topics, context-sensitive help for all IDE dialogs, wizards and actions, and the complete Force.com platform documentation and tutorials.
- Usability Enhancements add a friendly Start Page and improve wizards, screens, commands, editors and error handling in the Force.com IDE.
New Capabilities in SAAS
In addition, Coffee said the company demonstrated new capabilities in the company’s core SAAS (software-as-a-service) solution that will appear in the spring release of the platform.
“Today if you’ve got someone outside of your organization who asks you a question and you want to reply, you’ve often got to send a bulky e-mail” with a spreadsheet or some other type of attachment, Coffee said.
However, in the content application for the upcoming spring release of Salesforce, rather than having to deal with a bulky e-mail, all a user would need to do is click on a “display content” button, and all the recipient would need is to have a Web browser and click on a link, “and they will be looking at the folio of documents you wanted to show them without having to download and run an application,” he said.
“The model is as close as possible to zero assumptions about infrastructure as you can get,” Coffee said.
Mark Chellis, director of channel marketing at Motorola, said, “At Motorola, we are committed to creating an environment of success for our channel partners, which means making it extremely easy to deliver and close opportunities. Salesforce CRM is a one-of-a-kind technology that will help us turbo-charge our channel. We’ve launched the Salesforce Network for Motorola to offer our business partners the same CRM benefits we’ve achieved in our business.”
Also at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com unveiled Force.com Sites, a new capability of the Force.com platform that will allow customers to run their Web sites in Salesforce.com’s cloud. Force.com Sites will give customers the power to publish Force.com data and applications to any Web site, extending their reach to new users on intranets, external Web sites and online communities, the company said.
Running in the Cloud
And, as with all Salesforce.com services, Force.com Sites runs entirely in the cloud without the cost and complexity of traditional software, the company said. Force.com Sites is now available in developer preview here.
“Force.com Sites changes the entire paradigm for building applications,” said Narinder Singh, founder and head of technology and marketing at Appirio. “Companies no longer have to consider separate architectures and approaches depending on where the users are. Running Web sites in Salesforce.com’s cloud removes cost and complexity and allows companies to extend existing applications beyond their own four walls.”
Publishing business data and applications to the Web using Force.com Sites requires some simple steps to get up and running: A user must build an application on Force.com, using its sharing models and security rules to define what data and information to make public; use Visualforce to build the Web site’s external, public facing pages; register a Force.com domain name; and publish and run the site on Salesforce.com’s global trusted infrastructure.
“It is a dynamic, electrifying connection between what you have and what you’re able to let the world know about it,” Coffee said of the Salesforce.com strategy. “This is not just a Web site hosting solution. This is how you can have system builders and developers show that what the world sees and what you have in your environment is the same. We’re offering you more capability with less work.”
“With Force.com Sites, customers can run their Web sites in our cloud,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, in a statement. “Force.com Sites will enable a dramatic expansion of Force.com’s role in cloud computing for the enterprise. We expect our community to unleash entirely new kinds of applications and innovations that will truly drive our vision of ‘The End of Software.'”
“Running our business on Force.com has been night and day compared with our previous client/server infrastructure,” said Michael Wolverton, CEO of Cathedral Partners, a marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of privately held companies. “Our business revolves around our interactive Web application, a marketplace to connect buyers and sellers. With Force.com Sites we were able to get our marketplace up and running in a matter of weeks instead of the months it had taken with our previous architecture.”
Indeed, Salesforce.com said customers can use Force.com Sites to build and run new Web applications with Force.com Sites; transform business applications into Web sites by sharing a view of an application on a public Web site; and extend the Salesforce CRM applications through the creation of interactive Web-to-lead forms.
However, while Salesforce is holding its Dreamforce event in San Francisco, CRM competitor SugarCRM is holding its own event called Acceleration, where the company is talking about a bailout package for Salesforce.com users.
Martin Schneider, senior director of product marketing at SugarCRM, wrote in a blog post: “SugarCRM is announcing its own bailout plan–rescuing companies from the crushing effects of overpriced software. Let’s call it a Salesforce.com User Bailout.”
More details on the SugarCRM strategy are available here.