Salesforce.com Wants Clients to Play Nicely in Their Sandbox

By ROBERT LIU
TMCnet Wireless and Technology Columnist

As Salesforce.com continues its foray beyond sales automation and other traditional customer relationship management (CRM) related fields, the on-demand innovator has evolved with customization tools, a virtual operating system and, most recently, a new online partner pavilion dubbed AppExchange.

But as its customers increasingly turn to the on-demand platform to help finance, IT, human resources, legal, R&D and other departments, the Salesforce software can’t remain competitive without the same set of robust features that IT managers have come to rely on with traditional enterprise computing solutions.

To that degree, on Monday, the company will usher in the latest phase of its product evolution with the introduction of Salesforce Sandbox, a new product developing/testing service that will provide customers a replica of their existing Salesforce deployment no matter what level of customization or amount of data is stored on-demand across their entire enterprise.

“This is a product that we are launching in response to customer demand. They are now deploying our solution way beyond CRM solutions,” Phil Robinson, senior vice president of marketing, told TMCnet during a telephone briefing. “We're finding that we're becoming an enterprise platform, not just a CRM vendor. Customers want a full testing environment.”

The addition of Sandbox admittedly starts to fill some of the void surrounding the “self-service” support environment of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. For as little as $18 per month per existing user, Saleforce Enterprise Edition subscribers now have a virtual development or staging server to test out customized add-ons without interrupting their production environments.

“The Sandbox release is an important tool for big kids,” said Denis Pombriant, managing principal, Beagle Research Group. “This raises the bar for on-demand enterprise computing.”

Salesforce Sandbox will be available with the additional option of having a complete copy of the organization's production database with automatic refreshing to sync up any changes or updates made to the production environment. The complete Enterprise Edition will be available in January to customers for $25 per month per user.

Salesforce Sandbox will be released as part of the Winter ’06 product initiative, which is currently scheduled for later in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter ending January.

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.

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