Salesforce.com to Deliver Dramatic Leap Forward in IT Success With New ApexConnect Family of Multi-Tenant Integration Solutions
Apex API drives deep enterprise integration, now delivering more than 50 percent of salesforce.com service transactions
New ConnectOut will enable first on-demand outbound messaging in the industry
New ConnectOracle will deliver easy, bi-directional integration with Oracle 11i
New ApexConnect category on AppExchange features solutions from more than 25 integration partners
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 27 -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM], the technology and market leader in on-demand business services, today announced ApexConnect, revolutionizing and simplifying integration for CIOs and IT departments at customers of all sizes. ApexConnect will provide customers a comprehensive family of solutions for on-demand integration success, including the new ConnectOut feature of the Apex on-demand platform, enabling the industry's first on-demand outbound messaging API; the new ConnectOracle for integrating Salesforce with Oracle 11i; and a new ApexConnect category of integration partners on the AppExchange. ApexConnect is made possible by the multi-tenant architecture of the Apex platform, which dramatically reduces complexity in IT integration.
"ApexConnect is a multi-tenant aspirin for the headache of application integration that today's CIO's have inherited from their predecessors," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "Single-tenant vendors are a major source of integration pain as they continue to force upgrades that quickly break customers' existing integrations. Multi-tenant integration with ApexConnect is designed for customer success on The Business Web."
At the heart of ApexConnect is the multi-tenant Apex platform, one of the key innovations of salesforce.com. In contrast to single-tenant counterparts, multi-tenant platforms share a single, common infrastructure and code base that is centrally maintained. Individual customer deployments are unique, separate, and secure within this shared multi-tenant platform, rather than separate physical stacks of hardware and software. Multi-tenancy was pioneered by consumer Web applications like Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay -- all of which run a single code base that is shared by all users and upgraded simultaneously -- delivering all the benefits of innovative new releases, with none of the painful legacy of upgrades. The same power of multi-tenancy ensures that Salesforce customers do not have to rebuild their customizations or integrations every time the service is upgraded to the next version.
ApexConnect: Comprehensive Family of Multi-Tenant Integration Services
Just as customizations automatically remain in place as customers are upgraded to the next version of salesforce.com's service, with ApexConnect, all customers' integrations will maintain connections with legacy applications, Web services, and other on-demand applications. ApexConnect will provide a comprehensive set of services designed to address all major integration needs for CIOs and IT departments, providing for everything from pre-integrated AppExchange applications to custom integration with the Apex API.
Salesforce.com Apex API Transactions Surpass Page View Traffic for the First Time
ApexConnect comes at a time when customers and partners are integrating salesforce.com's on-demand applications more deeply into their business infrastructure than ever before. During salesforce.com's third quarter, Apex API transactions surpassed CRM page views on its service for the first time. More than 50 percent of the 3.7 billion transactions (page views or API calls through Salesforce or AppExchange applications) on the company's industry-leading Salesforce service were handled through the Apex API, demonstrating its extensive use and integration with external Web services, enterprise mash-ups and sophisticated business process and workflow applications.
"Our global sales teams needed access to product data stored in our SAP ERP system. With the Apex platform, integration between Salesforce and SAP was seamless," said Cheryl O'Connor, Worldwide CRM Strategy Manager, Analog Devices, Inc. "Now our sales teams have a unified view across customer activity and product information."
New ConnectOut - Industry's First On-Demand Outbound Messaging API
The new ConnectOut feature in the Apex platform will enable the first on-demand outbound messaging in the industry. This new feature will allow other applications, including a middleware system, message bus or software application, to be immediately notified of business events in Salesforce, such as the creation of a new customer or the closing of a sales opportunity. With this capability, business processes that span multiple systems can be executed seamlessly and without any latency or delay. The ConnectOut feature is currently scheduled to be available in conjunction with the release of Winter '07.
New ConnectOracle for Salesforce integration with Oracle 11i
With ApexConnect, Salesforce.com is also offering native connectors for common applications. In addition to integration with Office, Outlook, Lotus Notes, and the recently released ConnectSAP for integrating Salesforce with SAP R3, the company is announcing ConnectOracle for Salesforce integration with Oracle 11i. ConnectOracle will enable customers to seamlessly integrate Salesforce with their back-office Oracle 11i database to gain a completely integrated view of all relevant customer data in one place. The new connector will provide easy-to-implement and simple-to-use support for synchronizing account information between Salesforce and Oracle 11i and significantly reduces the time, expense, and effort required to integrate the two systems. ConnectOracle will bring several benefits to enterprise customers, including:
-- Fast and simple customer data integration, using a pre-built customer-master template to address end-to-end integration between Salesforce and Oracle 11i to accelerate the customer data integration process
-- Bidirectional synchronization of account information between Salesforce and Oracle 11i to keep customer data in both systems in sync
-- Access to front- and back-office enterprise customer data in Salesforce, enabling better, faster decisions with information transparency
ConnectOracle will be available upon request, for a $12,000 annual fee for Salesforce Enterprise Edition and Unlimited Edition customers. Availability is currently scheduled for early 2007.
New ApexConnect Category of Integration Partners on the AppExchange
The new ApexConnect category features more than 25 partner solutions for integration between Salesforce and common back-office, legacy ERP and custom applications. Integration solutions are available today from industry leaders, including: AboveAll, Business Objects, Bluewolf Group, Bridgewerx, Cast Iron, Composite Software, Data Backbone, Dynamic Ventures, forceAMP.com, ilink, Informatica, Integration Technologies Inc., InvisibleCRM, Ipedo, Jitterbit, OpenAccess Software, OKERE, Pervasive, Tibco, Salescentrix, Scribe, Sesame Software, SGC Software, Synergex and TwoConnect.
More than 230 partners today offer more than 430 applications on the AppExchange. Built using the Apex on-demand platform, these partner applications are integrated by design with salesforce.com's suite of on-demand business applications and can be deployed with a few clicks. More than 7,400 salesforce.com customers have deployed applications via the AppExchange, indicating a high degree of usage within the salesforce.com customer base and something that is only possible with a multi-tenant architecture.
The Apex platform, formerly known as the AppExchange platform, is available today. As previously announced, the next release of the Apex platform is currently scheduled to be available in conjunction with the release of Winter '07, and the Apex programming language is currently scheduled to be available during the first half of 2007.
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. Apex, the world's first on-demand platform, enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that extend beyond CRM to deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy and The Business Web across the enterprise. All Apex components and applications can be easily shared, exchanged and installed via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, available at salesforce.com/appexchange . Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.
As of October 31, 2006, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 27,100 customers and approximately 556,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis Budget Group, Inc, Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit www.salesforce.com/, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
NOTE: Salesforce.com is a registered trademark of salesforce.com, and Apex, AppExchange, The Business Web and Successforce are trademarks of salesforce.com, Inc., San Francisco, California. Other names used may be trademarks of their respective owners.
CONTACT: Gordon Evans of salesforce.com, +1-415-536-7608, or gevans@salesforce.com
