The AppExchange Blog
The AppExchange Blog - News & Announcements
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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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Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo and Software Business SLAM Conference
Feb 5, 2008FYI, I will be speaking about B2B social networking at the upcoming Software Business SLAM (Sales, Licensing, Alliances, and Marketing) Conference April 3 and Web 2.0 Expo April 22-25, both in San Francisco. Hope to see you there.
Here are the session abstracts-
B2B Social Networking: Important Lessons for Software Marketing and Product Development
What does the rising prominence of online social networking mean for today's B2B software companies? How can software companies ensure their marketing and product development strategies fully consider these new technologies and user behavior? What lessons can learned from the successes of consumer networks such as Facebook and YouTube?
Join Clara Shih, Founder of Faceforce, the first enterprise mash-up on Facebook, and Product Line Director of AppExchange at Salesforce.com, to learn about the future of B2B social networking and strategies for building better customer relationships and communities using social data. You will hear about innovative ways software companies are transforming their customer, recruiting, reseller, and vendor relationships with online social networking technology.
Faceforce: Bringing the Power of the Social Graph to Enterprise Apps
Clara Shih (Salesforce / Faceforce)Faceforce, which integrates Salesforce CRM with Facebook, is the first social enterprise mash-up. Approximately once per decade, the enterprise software industry undergoes a fundamental shift ushered in by a new disruptive technology. The 70s gave rise to mainframe computing, led by companies like IBM. In the 80s, the introduction of PCs gave rise to client-server computing, dominated by Microsoft, Oracle, and others. During the 90s, the Internet shook things up once again, making possible new innovations led by companies like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, and Salesforce.com. Today, we are seeing a fourth wave of “socially aware” enterprise applications.
This session will walk through the thinking behind Faceforce, future development plans, and how the social networking phenomenon at large will fundamentally change how business software is developed, deployed, and used. We will explore how the lines are increasingly blurring between the consumer and enterprise spaces, and what this means to businesses trying to market and sell their products.
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Kudos to EchoSign – Over 60 customers on AppExchange!
Feb 1, 2008We’d like to congratulate EchoSign, the latest AppExchange partner to exceed sixty joint customers on AppExchange with their On-Demand eSignatures and Contract Management application. Customers including Cartelligent, Intacct (also an AppExchange partner), and LinkedIn, use EchoSign for Salesforce to automatically sign, track, and file company contracts.
Along with this market success, EchoSign also recently closed $6 million of Series B financing in a round led by Emergence Capital. Kudos to the entire EchoSign team on reaching these dual milestones!
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B2B Social Networking at the SIIA Information Industry Summit
Jan 30, 2008First off, sorry for the radio silence. The last few months at salesforce.com have been full of exciting new changes -- it's been a bit overwhelming in fact (but in all good ways!). For example, long-time Silicon Valley veteran Polly Sumner joined the executive team as President and General Manager of Platform, Alliances, and Services. On a personal level, I expanded the scope of my responsibilities from product marketing only to now also include product management and strategy for the AppExchange. So I've had a lot on my mind -- and plan to share and update all of you in the next few weeks. Thereafter I promise to be more diligent about regular posts. :)
I'm in New York this week for the SIIA Information Industry Summit. I was on the B2B Social Networking panel this afternoon, alongside David Mather, President at Hoover's; Bob Carrigan, CEO of IDG Communications; and Mike Dunn, Vice President of Hearst Interactive Media. The panel was moderated by Steve Sieck, President of SKS Advisors. Hoover's happens to be an AppExchange content partner (in fact, here's a link to their listing).
We had a wonderful discussion around the latest social networking trends and what they mean for content publishers. Specifically, we delved into five major threads of discussion. Here was my take on some of these core issues-
1. Convergence of applications and content on the web. The primary value of open web services APIs to businesses and end users has been the seamless integration across multiple services that more closely match business workflow than ever before possible. To this end, we are seeing a convergence of software applications and content/data/information. Users do not want to login to and maintain multiple isolated systems. They want a one-stop shop that will capture end-to-end all of their business processes and content requirements. Software as a service in particular is amenable to content partnership due to the common subscription model, versus the upfront license and maintenance model of traditional software. Case in point are all the content partners like Jigsaw, Dow Jones, and Thomson that have become an integral part of the AppExchange.2. Closed, proprietary networks versus open networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
It remains to be seen whether proprietary networks such as Hoover's Connect (a product of Hoover's acquisition of Visible Path, announced today) and IDG Connect will ultimately win out over open general-purpose networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. They are two very different models - in the first, publisher typically monetize through selling premium content services. In the latter, publishers build widgets to integrate in the social networking container and more likely than not generate revenue through ads.Clarification (Made on Feb 1): Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, etc are arguably 'closed' networks themselves - what I meant by 'open' was open for anyone to join.
3. The role, importance, and feasibility of industry standards like Google OpenSocial.
Industry standards seem like a logical next move to prevent redundant work both on the part of developers/publishers as well as end users. OpenSocial, however elegant in theory, has yet to gain critical mass - moreover, there is concern that a single company (namely Google) developed this "industry standard" on their own. Data portability, though attractive to content publishers and owners, is not top of mind for social networking platforms, each of which has an incentive to "lock in" their users and content.4. Paradigm shift from search-centric to social-centric content environment. I maintain that it is not so much a paradigm shift, but rather a paradigm expansion to enable more nuanced targeting. Every decade or so, we have seen a disruptive computing technology that fundamentally changes the way we work and conduct business. In the 70s it was mainframe computing. In the 80s it was the client-server and GUI model. In the 90s, it was all about the Internet. Today, it is about social networking and the ability to target not only on search behavior but also demographic information (people are surprisingly forthcoming in their social networking profile pages) as well as leverage social graphs and groups.
5. Best practices in "curation" of B2B social networks.
The three pillars for social networking success in my opinion are trust, openness, and engagement. Of course, trust and openness are often at odds with one another - as a publisher, how do you guarantee a baseline level of privacy and security while still maintaining an open model in which creative destruction can safely take place. As for engagement, I believe it entails critical mass of users and content, and intrinsic value of content and services, both from the outset as well as on an ongoing basis. Too many social networks were "one-week wonders" which initially had tremendous user sign-up growth but then failed to keep their user base engaged.At salesforce, we are heavily invested in social networking technologies. CRM for one is arguably a social network of sorts among sales teams. We have also implemented a container for Google OpenSocial, which provides third-party app developers with all the scaffolding they need to build and ship a product.
The remaining efforts fall under three general categories. First, AppExchange is our online marketplace that connects customers and partners. Second, our Successforce and IdeaExchange web properties embody a strong social element - with IdeaExchange, for instance, we are crowdsourcing to our customers to solicit feedback for prioritizing product development. Last but not least, we have Salesforce to Salesforce, which is a really breakthrough idea if you think about it - instead of having end users as node entities, the connections in this case are being established between companies, say to co-sell into a deal, approve a contract, or even as simple as sharing marketing collateral.
I also spoke on behalf of Faceforce, the Facebook-Salesforce mash-up I developed last September that was the first enterprise application on the Facebook platform.
Social networking will only continue to increase in prominence and relevance, for two reasons- first, the 'Facebook Generation' will grow up and comprise an increasing portion of the workforce and company leadership. Second, enterprises are inherently social - whether it is relationships between employees, between a salesperson and customer, vendor and buyer, recruiter and candidate, etc - to this end, online social networking technologies rather than being completely novel are actually just better able to reflect real-world human behavior and interactions. So, it is not a matter of if social networking will permeate the enterprise or what the killers apps will be, but rather a matter of when it will become a core part of every enterprise application.
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Google OpenSocial and AppExchange
Nov 1, 2007In response to the spectacular response to Facebook's platform, which launched in May, Google has announced OpenSocial, its own set of open APIs and standards to allow third-party developers to build applications on and using data from Google's web properties. There was a good article this morning in the New York Times:
On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.
The strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook, which last spring opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site’s users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a “news feed” that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing."
This is exciting news for the AppExchange because now, developers can combine the power of Force.com with the OpenSocial APIs to create new enterprise applications on top of social graphs. For customers, this is yet another example of how the lines are blurring between the consumer and business webs. I can't wait to see what our developer community comes up with ... stay tuned for a new wave of "socially aware" enterprise apps on AppExchange!
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The information you want, when you want, right on the AppExchange home page (New!)
Sep 23, 2007Some of you like seeing the most installed apps. Some of you love Latest Listings (thanks for all the feedback when we temporarily replaced those with Top Business Needs). We know you are at different levels of familiarity with AppExchange, have different business needs and preferences, and work in very different roles and industries.
Therefore, one of our top initiatives in the coming months will be to offer increasing levels of customization and personalization on the site. As a first step, we've rolled out five widgets containing information important to you on the AppExchange home page:
- Latest Listings. To help you stay current with the innovations our community of over 300 ISV partners and 50,000 developers are making available via the AppExchange. (RSS subscription available)
- Top 10 Installs. So you can see what is most popular among the customer community. This is, of course, just one measure of popularity. We could also show you "Most Test Driven Apps" or "Apps with Highest Ratings." We are counting on you to tell us what's important. (RSS subscription available)
- Common Business Needs. To save you time and clicks, we've taken the most popular business need areas (based on our quarterly customer surveys) and site search terms and displayed them here for easy access.
- Latest Community Review. See what other customers are saying about AppExchange apps. Don't forget to return the favor by reviewing the apps you've installed and sharing tips & tricks!
- Featured Native Apps. So you can experience first-hand the power of the Force.com platform. With Apex code and Visualforce, just about anything can be developed and run completely on demand. Native apps boast higher performance, better security, more seamless integration, and ease of use and administration.
Well, what next? Eventually, these widgets will be movable and collapsible, just like iGoogle or My Yahoo! Have suggestions for other widgets we can provide? Please tell us on the IdeaExchange!
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AppExchange @ Dreamforce!
Aug 22, 2007
It's hard to believe Dreamforce is just a month away! We have an incredible line-up of speaker sessions, expo booths, hands-on training, demos, and networking events this year, especially around the AppExchange.
Here are just a few of the ways you can discover the AppExchange @ Dreamforce:
Tracks
Expo
- Success Clinics and Demo Stations
- AppExchange Expert Booth
- Certified Partner Solutions
Hands-on training
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Customer Success on AppExchange.com!
Aug 1, 2007By popular demand, we've created a new section on the AppExchange site dedicated to customer success.
Looking for inspiration? See how other customers are using the AppExchange to extend their on-demand success and get the most out of Salesforce CRM. Learn best practices for maximizing limited resources, automating business processes to help your organization scale, improve collaboration and analytics, and reduce the burden of having to develop everything in-house:
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Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords: acquire new customers and make your business more efficient
Jun 5, 2007At a private event in San Francisco this afternoon, Marc Benioff and Sheryl Sandberg (who runs Google's AdWords business) formally announced a global strategic alliance between Salesforce and Google. The alliance encompasses five critical areas of partnership and shared values:
- Technology. A new product was announced today: Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords replaces our best-selling Team Edition product and offers seamless integration with Google AdWords. Not only can you create and manage AdWords campaigns from within Salesforce, but you now get free AdWords just for signing up for the Salesforce product, as well as instant access to lead management, dashboards, and links to related Google apps. The two companies have worked closely together to create a breakthrough new product that makes it easier than ever before for small businesses to take advantage of the Internet to scale quickly and efficiently. And there is tremendous opportunity here - Sheryl cited the statistic that even in the US, over 50% of small businesses do not have a website and are not taking advantage of the tremendous efficiencies possible with the Internet. The number presumably is much higher elsewhere.
- Distribution. Salesforce is now an official reseller of the Google AdWords platform. We believe it's an ideal fit for existing customers, and a compelling differentiator for prospects.
- Business Model. Salesforce and Google pioneered the B2B Internet selling model. Instead of requiring customers to pay upfront for software licenses or ads before they demonstrate value, the "pay as you go" model both companies have always embraced aligns our customers very fundamentally with customers' best interest, since we are continually working to win repeat business.
- Community. Both companies have become successful over the years thanks to the passion and engagement of their user and developer communities. On the developer front, both companies plan to further build out their APIs to enable even more creativity and mash-up innovation on the AppExchange, eg Appirio's Google Gadgets for Salesforce.
- Philanthropy. Just before their IPO in 2004, Google adopted the "1-1-1" model of philanthropy introduced by Marc in his first book, Compassionate Capitalism, in which 1% of equity, 1% of product (donations to nonprofit organizations), and 1% of employees' time are set aside for charity. Marc and Sheryl also made history today in announcing that this joint product will be given away for free to registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits!
Now, any business can establish an online presence, market to larger audiences, and measure ROI with just a few clicks and a few hundred dollars. We are all very excited about these developments and welcome your ideas on future potential integration areas!
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First-ever Salesforce Developer Conference highlights a new model for entrepreneurship and innovation
May 30, 2007Sorry for the hiatus - I was on vacation the last few weeks. Luckily for me, I returned just in time for last Monday's Developer Conference in Santa Clara. It was a cathartic experience. The standing room-only ballroom was packed with developers and entrepreneurs young and old and of every color (though mostly male :) from around the globe. Waiting in line to get in, I met a software engineer from Dublin who came across the Salesforce Platform, decided then to leave his big-company job, and was there that day to get ideas, learn the API, network, and start building AppExchange solutions for EMEA. Incredible!
Marc and Parker kicked off the morning with a keynote outlining the Salesforce platform vision. We heard inspiring eBay-like stories about how customers and developers can more easily than ever find one another. Also, there are AppExchange customers from 70 different countries around the world, and nearly one-quarter of all AppExchange applications are built outside the US! The AppExchange is rife with compelling examples of innovation, globalization and community.
Parker talked about some of the applications we're using internally that were written 100% natively on the Salesforce platform, including Vacation Requests, Sales Compensation, Bug Tracking, Adaptive Development Methodology (used by our R&D teams), Volunteering, and Employee Success Plans. He also unveiled SalesforceSOA, a revolutionary way to quickly create and integrate with web services, all on-demand.
Guy Kawasaki concluded the morning with an exceptional presentation of some of the ideas from his book, Art of the Start. My favorite was actually his first point: Make meaning.
He used the example of the ice business and how the dominant means of production changed over the years. First, there was ice harvesting (think Bubba and son with ice pick and sled in hand). Then, ice factories. And now, refrigerators. Each of these was a quantum leap that was orders of magnitude more efficient than the prior model. This was not evolution. These were each revolutions. The best ice harvester did not make the best ice factories. The best ice factory entrepreneurs I guarantee you were the last to embrace refrigerators. They probably did everything in there power to discourage refrigerators.
Key lesson for ice entrepreneurs: Learn how to make refrigerators.
Key lesson for ice consumers: Buy refrigerators. Your life will be a lot easier and you will have better drinks and picnics!It's the classic innovator's dilemma. Guy likes ice, I like cameras. Just ten years ago, Kodak was king. Then came the disruption of digital cameras. Kodak tried to ignore digital cameras for as long as they could. People want to be able to print and touch and feel their photos, their executives argued. When the consumer market was clearly lost, they focused on professional photographers. And then finally, one day they woke up and realized things were never going to be the same again. They embraced digital photography as quickly as they possibly could. But it was too late. And frankly, it wouldn't have mattered, since the technology to make refrigerators is totally different than the technology to make ice factories. Or ice picks.
Key lesson for photograph entrepreneurs: Learn how to make digital cameras and process digital photos.
Key lesson for photograph consumers: Buy a digital camera. Your life will be a lot easier and you will have better pictures! Also, non-digital cameras won't be supported for very much longer.Multi-tenant On Demand is a quantum leap for the software industry. It's already changed the way you communicate with friends and families, share photos, read the news, shop, sell the junk in your attic... and it's going to empower your business to achieve new heights of efficiency and success. The Salesforce Platform is the Frigidaire of software, the Canon of digital cameras.
Key lesson for software entrepreneurs: Learn how to write apps on the Salesforce Platform.
Key lesson for software users and admins: Start using on-demand applications. Your life will be a lot easier and you will have a better business! Thanks to the Internet, traditional software is on its way out.As for ice harvesters, ice factory tycoons, or on-premise software vendors... does anyone even remember them?
Ten-year stock price of Eastman Kodak (EK)
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Extend On Demand to every department and employee with Salesforce Platform Edition
Apr 24, 2007In 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.
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Salesforce China Edition makes Salesforce CRM accessible to the over 10 million SMBs in China
Apr 24, 2007Marc Benioff was in Hong Kong yesterday announcing Salesforce China Edition, our first regional product. SCE has been priced affordably to make our world-class on demand solutions accessible to the over 10 million small and medium businesses in China.
With SCE, Chinese businesses can start using a simplified Chinese-only version of Salesforce CRM starting at 888RMB ($111 USD) per user per year. In case you're wondering, '8' is a lucky number in Chinese culture. In case you're wondering more, simplified Chinese is used in mainland China (it was mandated by Mao), and traditional Chinese is used throughout Hong Kong, Singapore, Macao, and Taiwan.
CRMchump says "[SCE is] a great way to practice your Chinese." :)
It's been interesting to see Salesforce gain traction in the Chinese market with On Demand. First, being multi-tenant is a tremendous advantage and arguably a must-have for rapidly growing businesses because it scales instantly. Imagine you are an aspiring Chinese entrepreneur, your manufactured exports business is taking off, you can't sign up customers quickly enough... the last thing on your mind is (as it should be) your software systems. You don't want to have to worry about buying new servers every few months because of your amazing growth, or worry about locating a reliable data center so that you don't lose all your customer data. You should be focused on finding new customers and filling as many orders ASAP as possible. Also, being multi-tenant means that no one has Salesforce.com's source code, nor can anyone peddle Salesforce on the streets of Beijing for 50 cents (I was once given a CD of Oracle 9i that was procured in just such a manner).
There is a gigantic leapfrog opportunity here for Chinese businesses seeking CRM to start on demand rather than going through pain of messy on premise deployments. That is, after all, what happened in this market (and most emerging markets) in terms of leapfrogging unwieldy landline telephone infrastructure with mobile phones.
Finally, this heightened market presence in China will help even further fuel the local developer movement onto the Salesforce Platform... which just means more innovation for customers. Strategically, Salesforce is trying to achieve this platform and ecosystem vision along three dimensions: new verticals (eg, Salesforce for Wealth Management announced in February), new regions (eg, Salesforce China Edition), and new products (see my next post).
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Introducing the New AppExchange Blog
Jan 25, 2007A recent McKinsey study shows that demand for on demand almost doubled in the last year: 61 percent of CIOs are now considering SaaS, and the number just keeps growing. Everyone from eWeek to InfoWorld is predicting that 2007 will be the year of SaaS and the Business Web. Having found success with Salesforce CRM, customers are now asking how they can extend their on-demand success to more departments and users, and get the most out of their Salesforce deployments.
2006 was an incredible year for on-demand innovation at Salesforce
Forbes Magazine has just recognized the AppExchange as one of the top ten disruptive innovations of 2006, along with YouTube and the Nintendo Wii. Forbes calls the AppExchange "a revolutionary model for software distribution." Wii agree.
With so many exciting things happening in the Salesforce community, we are launching this blog on the one-year anniversary of the AppExchange to provide on-demand thought leadership, share best practices we’ve seen and heard from customers, and discuss the latest AppExchange-related developments and announcements. This blog will complement existing Salesforce blogs on Apex platform development , App of the Week, and CRM Success.
Over the next few months, we’ll be covering topics such as incentive management, email marketing, and integration with real examples from real customers. Drop me a line if there are any particular topics you’d like to see covered.
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