The AppExchange Blog
The AppExchange Blog - News & Announcements
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Momentum in Cloud Computing
May 18, 2009Seems like all the news cycles report continue bad economic news, job losses, plant closing, and dire economic forecasts. However, Cloud Computing seems to be a rare exception. More information arrives every day to suggest that not only are clouds rolling in, but a cloudy forecast brings good news. Consider the following:
- Maxplore hires Cloud Computing Industry vet Dave Yarnold as CEO. He was VP of Sales for Success Factors and he sees a huge opportunity in field service.
- Right90 secures a new patent blending OLTP and OLAP to deliver better forecasting. You can expect more news from them this week.
- Cast Iron finds itself in full glossy color in the Wall Street Journal as a great example of a company using the down turn to build competitive advantage.And even the iPhone crowd needs great cloud business apps like Salesforce. And with all the news coverage on Force.com being 5X faster to develop on than the old school platforms, expect the clouds to keep rolling in. Next stop, Denver tomorrow for Cloudforce.
See you there.
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Introducing Sara Bright, a redesigned AppExchange, and The Facebook Era!
Mar 31, 2009I have some exciting news to share. After three years with the AppExchange team wearing many different hats from product marketing to product line management, I am transitioning to a new role at salesforce.com. Yesterday, I launched my new book, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff (Prentice Hall), at Harvard Business School (read about it in the NY Times>>). The Facebook Era is about how social networks like Facebook and Twitter are changing the expectations of and possibilities for business, and what new tools are available to sales and marketers to reach customers more effectively.
Starting today, I will be focused 100% on our social networking alliances here at salesforce.com, such as what we have been doing with Facebook and Twitter. As you might have guessed from my more recent blogs and our company announcements, making social media work for the enterprise continues to be an exciting area of innovation and investment for us. We appreciate the ideas and success stories many of you in the community have shared which are helping to shape the direction of these initiatives!
The AppExchange, of course, continues to be an important part of our strategy and business. Thanks to your enthusiasm and usage, the AppExchange today is bigger and more successful than ever, connecting tens of thousands of customers with innovation from developers and ISV partners from around the world. Together, we have taken the AppExchange to a new place: delivering Checkout partner commerce in November 2008 and a newly redesigned AppExchange site just a few weeks ago which is built 100% natively on our platform using the new Force.com Sites technology. The new AppExchange incorporates ideas and feedback from hundreds of salesforce.com customers and partners over the last two years.
Sara Bright, who is the lead product marketer on AppExchange and played a critical role in the site redesign, will be taking over this blog. In fact, in her first post she will walk through the specific features and architecture of the new site. Please join me in welcoming her officially to the AppExchange Blog!
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Just announced: the best AppExchange apps of 2008
Feb 4, 2009
2008 was a big year for the AppExchange. We saw a record number of native apps come on board and get embraced by the community. We also had a record number of customer reviews, which made this "Best of 2008" campaign possible.
From Apttus Contract & Proposal Management and the Ribbit for Salesforce mobile app to Jobscience TalentCentral and Conga Merge Document Management, customers have told us anecdotally and from their reviews that they like what they see! Thank you to everyone who submitted a review and congrats to all the winners!
Click here to check out the other "Best of 2008" AppExchange apps!
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Announcing Force.com Checkout: Buy AppExchange Apps in Clicks
Dec 10, 2008Exciting news! Starting this week, customers and partners can buy and sell AppExchange apps online anytime, anywhere, from a browser.
On Monday, we officially launched Force.com Checkout to a standing-room only audience at our Cloudforce Event in New York. With Checkout, it is easier than ever for customers to do business with salesforce.com and our partners. Customers now have a "one stop shop" where you can trial, pay for, start using, and manage subscriptions of Salesforce CRM and some of your favorite AppExchange partner apps.
Here is what CRM Buyer had to say:
“On Monday, Salesforce.com announced some of the remaining pieces of the grand puzzle when it introduced Checkout…a necessary component that, though its focus is financial rather than technical, enables the technology to fully function. It appears to me that with Checkout, Salesforce now has deployed a new closed-loop business process for cloud computing that starts with development, moves through distribution and sales, and culminates in the transaction and payment….This is cool stuff.”
All Checkout partner applications are natively built and run on Force.com, which means you can rest assured they have the same security, reliability, and performance of applications from salesforce.com. And it's not just CRM applications. The majority of Checkout apps and new AppExchange apps are extending the SaaS model beyond just your sales, marketing, and customer service functions to other important areas in your company: human resources, IT, finance, operations, you name it. Here is the full list:
- Financials and accounting ERP from CODA
- Non-profit constituent relationship management from Convio
- Fleet management solutions from Datasul
- Order management ERP solutions from Glovia, a subsidiary of Fujitsu
- Staffing solutions from Jobscience
- Mobile expense reporting from Model Metrics
- Recruiting from Riptide
- Real estate management from Riptide
- Customer reference tracking from Riptide
- Risk management from StakeWare
- Financial relationship management from StraightThrough
- Productivity tools from Appirio
- Compensation management from Callidus
- Salesforce CRM administrator tools from DrivEnable
Existing customers, you can start using Checkout today from your dropdown menu inside the app. Everyone else, learn more here.
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Social meets enterprise: Announcing Force.com for Facebook
Nov 4, 2008
Yesterday, we made history.
During the opening platform keynote at Dreamforce 08, Marc Benioff, Chairman, CEO, and Founder of salesforce.com, and Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, unveiled Force.com for Facebook, a new partnership between Facebook and salesforce.com that allows Facebook developers to build and run their apps on the Force.com enterprise cloud. Force.com for Facebook is made possible by our new Force.com Sites technology, which allows customers and partners to publish any Force.com app to any website, whether its their intranet, public website, or even Facebook and other containers.
Directly from within Apex Code, developers can easily call out to the Facebook APIs, make FQL queries for social graph data, and generate FBML/XFBML. For the first time, Facebook developers can take full advantage of salesforce.com's global trusted infrastructure that takes care of everything from data center and hardware to database, application, operations, and enterprise services like security, sharing, permissions, and workflow. We want developers to focus on great ideas and innovation, not infrastructure.
This is exciting news for everyone. Our customers want to be where their customers are, and increasingly, their customers are spending time on Facebook. salesforce.com customers now have a new and powerful way for viral distribution and end-user engagement like never before. Facebook developers now have a faster, more complete, and lower risk model than ever before-- not to mention the possibilities around accessing new audiences and business models beyond traditional ads. Last but certainly not least, Facebook users will enjoy a whole new class of business applications integrated as part of their Facebook experience.
To learn more and start developing now, click here
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Teaming up with Google to deliver the ultimate On Demand apps
Apr 14, 2008We are excited to announce a new partnership with Google that will help you get even more out of your on-demand applications -- both CRM and beyond. Today, we launched Salesforce for Google Apps, which combines the power of Salesforce CRM with the Google applications many of us are already using, including Gmail, Calendar, Google Talk, Documents & Spreadsheets, and Presentation in a seamlessly integrated, affordable, and 100% on-demand new offering.
At the same time, we have unveiled a new "Google" category on AppExchange which already features ten applications, and will undoubtedly grow as more developers build joint applications on the Force.com and Google platforms-as-a-service.
When you are running a business, you have better things to worry about than manually syncing unwieldy Excel spreadsheets and trying to keep track of different versions of Powerpoint email attachments. With Salesforce for Google Apps and the complementary set of applications in the new Google category on AppExchange, all of your organization's critical information and communication data are now fully and automatically synced on-demand, accessible from any browser on any device. This is exciting news for Salesforce customers and Google users -- the two biggest on-demand companies in the world coming together for the End of Software and the End of Office!
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Not quite AppExchange
Apr 10, 2008Yesterday Google unveiled App Engine and App Gallery, which some bloggers have likened to AppExchange. But it's really quite different.
First, what is App Engine? Like Force.com, it is a web app development platform-as-a-service. App Gallery is the directory for sharing apps built on the App Engine.
There are two important distinctions. First, the platform and apps at least right now are focused around the Consumer Web, for example games, news, finance, sports, etc. Second, as shown in this Youtube clip, App Engine development is more focused on code-driven development.
Force.com gives application developers a choice of code or clicks (or both) to build, customize, and integrate. App Engine fills an important gap for building, hosting and sharing consumer web apps - and we expect to see that across App Engine and AppExchange, more and more people around the world will be able to make their personal and professional lives easier with platforms-as-a-service and generally the On-Demand model.
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Six popular AppExchange solutions sweep Beagle Research Group 2008 Awards
Apr 9, 2008Kudos to AppExchange partners Firepond (quoting & configuration), InsideView (sales intelligence), LucidEra (analytics), Marketo (marketing automation), TerrAlign (mapping and territory planning), and Verticals onDemand (industry customization templates for Salesforce CRM) for sweeping six of seven of this year's coveted Beagle Research Group 2008 WizKids Awards that showcase "some of the brightest emerging companies in front office computing."
This is well-deserved validation for some of our most popular AppExchange solutions, as well as wonderful proof that AppExchange is the authoritative one-stop shop for SaaS applications.
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800th application just posted on the AppExchange!
Apr 8, 2008Congratulations to Brazilian ISV partner Datasul for listing the milestone 800th app on AppExchange! Datasul SA Fleet Management is a corporate fleet management solution for tracking trucks, buses, forklifts, tractors, and other vehicles. Datasul joins our over 400 partners worldwide with pre-integrated, pre-certified solutions listed on AppExchange.
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AppExchange at Dreamforce Europe, May 7-8
Feb 6, 2008Did you know that over one-third of Salesforce customers have global deployments and that we have AppExchange customers from over 75 countries? Not surprisingly, a large number of you are in Europe. As such, AppExchange is planning a large presence at our upcoming first-ever Dreamforce Europe event May 7-8 in London.
Here is a preview of some of our proposed sessions-
We decided to let the attendees decide on the conference sessions and agenda, so get your votes in soon. See you in London!
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