In addition to Salesforce China Edition, the other big announcement we made yesterday was our new platform product, Salesforce Platform Edition (SPE). Prior to SPE, all of our products (TE, PE, EE, UE) contained both application (SFA, marketing, service and support, PRM) and platform (eg, workflow, custom fields, custom objects, dashboards, API, etc) functionality, albeit to varying degrees.

As Salesforce deployments are expanding beyond CRM users however in sales, marketing, and service and support, to new areas across the enterprise such as HR, finance, legal, operations, R&D, etc., customers began asking to purchase platform functionality independent of the CRM application (it doesn't make sense, for example, for someone in recruiting to need to have access to forecasts and opportunities).

So, we did. Salesforce Platform Edition unbundles the platform from the CRM. With SPE, you can run AppExchange applications, run your custom apps, and have full access to full platform functionality including analytics, integration, and customization capability. At $50/user/month for EE and $100/user/month for UE, it's priced at less than half the cost of the fully bundled product and therefore makes it easier for organizations to move more of their employees and processes on demand.

Customers used to ask us "why do only sales, marketing, and support get to have all the fun?" Now,  running any part of your business on demand is as easy as using Salesforce CRM.

Here's a hypothetical organization using a mix of CRM and non-CRM licenses:

There are also organizations who are telling us they want to buy the platform edition only, say if (I know it's hard to believe) they have another CRM solution.

It's been great to witness even in the nine months I've been working here the transformation Salesforce is undergoing from CRM applications vendor to a platform and ecosystem. Want to learn more? I'm delivering a webinar in two weeks on how to use this new Salesforce Platform Edition product to full advantage of the AppExchange and Salesforce Platform.