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Salesforce.com Declares the Arrival of the Business WebTMCnet Communications and Broadband Columnist
Salesforce.com is breaking out of CRM to bring the business Internet to the masses. The release of the AppExchange and Winter ’06 brings the arrival of the Business Web.
Partnering with companies such as Adobe, Business Objects and Skype, the AppExchange On-Demand platform provides for more than 150 applications available to users. In the first seven days of operation, more than 1,500 application installations have taken place. Salesforce.com introduced the AppExchange as the “ebay for the business customer.” By using the applications available in AppExchange, the need for maintaining software and internal infrastructures is eliminated. Comprised of a network of on-demand applications, services, components and development efforts, the Business Web enables customers to run their entire business on demand.
“For the past seven years, Salesforce.com has been focused on innovation and has really been working toward this type of deployment,” stated Phill Robinson, chief marketing officer, salesforce.com. “The AppExchange is the first of its kind to offer a secure, scalable, robust network that will set the global standard.”
In the past year, Salesforce.com has invested more than $50 million into an infrastructure called Mirrorforce. A complete hardware and software replacement, Mirrorforce was designed to provide On-Demand and address disaster recovery. This investment included three new data center facilities in San Francisco, San Jose and northern Virginia.
Formerly known as Customforce, the AppExchange was switched live on January 9 and is intended to take salesforce.com beyond the focus of CRM into other areas such as Finance and Accounting, Human Resources, Real Estate and Payment Processing to name a few.
The AppExchange also enables global developer and partners to develop, publish, market, and distribute their products to a global audience and instantly connect with salesforce.com’s 18,700 customers and 351,000 subscribers.
There is no charge for trying or using applications on AppExchange. Applications from partners will generally require a fee, however those authored by salesforce.com are available free of charge.
Looking into the future for salesforce.com, Robinson noted that the company anticipates thousands of applications beyond the current offerings. “The intent is for this service to be broadly applicable both globally and by industries. There is not an industry that cannot utilize the most complex engineering on the planet right now.”
Beyond Mirrorforce and AppExchange is the release of Winter '06 , the 19th generation of salesforce.com’s on-demand CRM solutions, which will bring a new user interface for the salesforce products designed to improve productivity and navigation. Territory management to provide for better organization and management of a wide-scale customer base and customizable forecasting and better analytical tools will also be available.
Salesforce.com has come under fire as of late for recent service interruptions. While eWeek that the December outage lasted nearly 5 hours, salesforce.com argued that the outage lasted no longer than 2.5 hours and was a result of a vendor issue which was quickly resolved. This could present a challenge for Salesforce.com when customers are denied access to mission critical data.
While this release from Salesforce.com is the beginning of Business Web, the company is most certainly not destined to navigate these uncharted territories alone. Rumors abound that SAP and FrontRange Solutions are both working on their on-demand platforms for release this year. What little buzz has been sparked concerning Microsoft ignores the possibility of cannibalism should Microsoft attempt to compete in a world that eliminates software.
Salesforce.com claims to be on the edge of innovation that will maintain their leadership in the Business Web and keep competitors at bay. There is little room for down time on a system designed to allow customers the ability to run their entire business on-demand. While salesforce.com makes the guarantee that there is no threat of loss of data in the event of an outage, the inability to access the system at any time can be detrimental to salesforce.com. There is much to be proven in the Business Web and we will be watching to see where it takes us.
Service Provider Summit
Be sure to catch the debut of the Service Provider Summit at the upcoming INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & Expo, EAST, which runs January 24-27, 2006, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., focusing on key issues number portability, ENUM, e911, IMS, SIP and much more.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.
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