CRM Platform enables software-free programming.
Press Release Summary:
Salesforce Summer '07 on-demand CRM application and platform enables users to program multi-tenant applications with Apex Code and Platform-as-a-Service. Features include external Web services integration, SOAP and MML accessibility, IT-ready development environment, customizable workflow formula incorporation, search-based user interface, custom report wizard, and personalized on-demand Web 2.0 collaborative customer portal.
Original Press Release:
Salesforce.com Heats up Enterprise CRM with Salesforce Summer '07, Based on World's First Platform-as-a-Service
MELBOURNE, Australia, July 16 -- salesforce.com Summer '07 Launch Event -- Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced the release of Salesforce Summer '07, for the first time delivering Apex Code to salesforce.com customers and unleashing the power of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to the industry. Salesforce Summer '07 is the 23rd generation of the world's most popular on-demand CRM application and delivers a completely customizable CRM application and Platform and a number of industry "firsts" to the enterprise on-demand market. Salesforce.com customers continue to establish major milestones for the on-demand industry with the power of PaaS. Salesforce.com customers have created more than 125,000 custom applications and objects, completed 30,000 AppExchange installs and produced almost 100 million daily transactions -- proving that salesforce.com is the most customized, integrated and adopted on-demand application and platform on the market today.
"Salesforce.com and Software-as-a-Service revolutionized CRM. Now Platform-as-a-Service and Apex Code stand to revolutionize how customers build and deploy apps," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Customers can write code that runs on our servers -- it's programming without software. Better yet, it's The End of Software."
"Salesforce.com's architecture allows us to easily accommodate the different needs and personalities of our many businesses and markets while still operating with our standard, One DuPont SAP transaction engine. This is a powerful combination," said Robert R. Ridout, vice president, DuPont Information Technology (IT) and Chief Information Officer (CIO) of DuPont.
Salesforce Summer '07 comes at a watershed moment for the on-demand industry -- on-demand has now moved to the mainstream. Summer '07 is salesforce.com's third release this year, maintaining a pace of innovation unmatched by any competitor. Recently, Gartner placed salesforce.com in the Leaders Quadrant in its Magic Quadrant for sales force automation. Salesforce.com believes this accomplishment marks a maturity of the SaaS industry and an acknowledgement of its role in revolutionizing the software landscape.
"With Summer '07, salesforce.com has not only demonstrated the power of SaaS for the enterprise, but more importantly, the power of PaaS," said Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research. "Apex Code and industry defining features like intelligent work flow and multi-instance development environment provide clarity to enterprise CIOs by enabling them to focus on innovation, not infrastructure."
Summer '07 -- Delivering Platform-as-a-Service and Apex Code to Customers
With the release of Salesforce Summer '07, salesforce.com customers will be able to experience the power of programming free from the burdens of software with Apex Code and PaaS. For the first time, customers will be able to use Apex Code to write any application and leverage the scalability, reliability, and availability of running it directly on salesforce.com's industry-leading PaaS. All applications written with Apex Code are 100 percent multi-tenant, ensuring that they are automatically upgraded at the same time as the Salesforce service.
"We are very excited to get our hands on Apex Code and develop entirely new on-demand applications so that our entire company can go on-demand. We are confident that the new applications we build with Apex Code will further enhance the success we've achieved with salesforce.com to date," said Mike Epner, Vice President, Worldwide Services and Support, Borland.
Summer '07 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. In fact, customers have performed more than 125,000 customizations to their Salesforce instances, showcasing the ease and power of adapting Salesforce to each customer's unique business processes. During salesforce.com's first quarter, more than 50 percent of the 5.4 billion transactions (page views or API calls through Salesforce or AppExchange applications) on the company's industry-leading Salesforce service were handled through the Salesforce Web Services API, demonstrating its extensive use and integration with external Web services, enterprise mash-ups and sophisticated business process and workflow applications.
Apex Code is a Java-like development language that is secure, easy and fast, and will be immediately familiar to any Java programmer. Anything built using Apex Code can be made available as a Web service and is accessible via SOAP and XML standards. More than 1,200 members of the Salesforce Developer Network have had access to Apex Code since January in a developer preview to build prototype applications and provide feedback on the code.
Leading the Industry by Delivering "IT Ready" Firsts
Apex Code provides enterprise developers and IT departments the ability to program completely custom applications for their on-demand platform. In addition, the multi-instance development environment and intelligent workflow features available in Summer '07 give enterprise business users the ability to completely customize their application. Salesforce.com is the only company that is delivering the flexible complexity that enterprises need with its unique PaaS model. Salesforce.com continues to be the clear standard for on-demand in the enterprise by delivering a number of on-demand "firsts" including:
--First "IT Ready" On-Demand Multi-Instance Development Environment -- Salesforce Sandbox, introduced with the Winter '06 release, allows companies to create a duplicate copy of their Salesforce development environment with one click. This popular feature ensures that testing, training and development scenarios can be run without interrupting the production use of the application. In response to requests from the salesforce.com community, salesforce.com is delivering the capability for customers to deploy multiple Salesforce Sandboxes with Summer '07. Enterprise customers can now have separate environments for testing, development and training to achieve a true enterprise development environment.
-- First "IT Ready" On-Demand Intelligent Workflow -- While most on-demand competitors are just starting to incorporate rudimentary workflow into their solutions, salesforce.com is releasing Enterprise Intelligent Workflow. With the availability of Intelligent Workflow, customers can now create complex rules and approvals by adding formulas in workflow. Now anything from complex case assignment rules to sophisticated price discount approvals can be completely customized to fit each individual customer's business needs.
Industry Leading User Experience: Collaboration, Efficiency and Empowerment
Salesforce.com has always delivered an industry-leading user experience that has driven strong adoption of its CRM applications. Summer '07 continues to provide innovative ease of use and powerful customization tools to let developers, users and customers take their user interfaces and experiences to the next level.
-- Salesforce Mobile User Interface -- With the Summer '07 release, Salesforce Mobile is debuting an entirely new search-based user interface, enabling users to find the information they need quickly and easily. The new user interface is completely streamlined with a search box on the main screen. From here users can search for contacts, accounts, opportunities and much more. The results are delivered in an easy to navigate list, grouped by category, from which a user can select the correct solution. In addition, users can now access reports for the first time through Salesforce Mobile.
-- Rich-Content Solutions -- Now, companies using the solution knowledge base in Salesforce Service & Support can illustrate complex solutions easily with diagrams, pictures and other rich-content by creating solutions using HTML to make solutions and services easier to find and understand than ever before.
-- Custom Report Wizard -- Previously, users were able to create custom reports using a standard report wizard which enabled them to achieve true insight into their business programs. Now, users can create completely customized report wizards to make creating reports an easy and streamlined process.
-- On-Demand Collaborative Customer Portal -- The Salesforce Customer Portal delivers the latest Web 2.0 collaboration technologies to enable companies to offer their customers a branded 24x7 self-service portal. The Salesforce Customer Portal enables companies to personalize the portal for different users, roles and companies and easily customize the portal with their brand. For customer service departments, the new self-service portal will use the knowledgebase to suggest solutions to customers and leverages the power of collaborative communities to also deliver customer driven solutions.
"It took us less than a week to customize, brand, and fully deploy the Salesforce Customer Portal," said Mark Silber of QUALCOMM Incorporated. "Salesforce Service & Support gives our IT department the ability to react quickly to changes driven by the business and to revise the app in minutes-not days or weeks-using easy point-and-click capabilities. This allows us to deliver a whole new standard of customer service."
Availability
Salesforce Summer '07 is currently scheduled to be available in August to customers through salesforce.com's multi-tenant, on-demand model. The Salesforce Customer Portal will be available for an additional fee starting at $5 per user, per month, per portal. Multiple Sandboxes are available at an additional fee for Unlimited and Enterprise Edition customers. Apex Code is available for Unlimited Edition customers at no additional charge.
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2007 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Salesforce Platform and the AppExchange
Salesforce Platform is the on-demand platform for the next generation of business applications. Salesforce Platform reinvents traditional customization and integration and enables a new generation of on-demand applications that go beyond client/server computing. The Salesforce Platform allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, enabling all the innovation that the Salesforce Platform unleashes to benefit the entire on-demand community.
More than 600 applications are now available on salesforce.com's AppExchange, the world's first on-demand application directory, found at salesforce.com/appexchange.
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. The Salesforce Platform, 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. The Salesforce Platform allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks 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 April 30, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 32,300 customers including ABN AMRO, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, Sprint Nextel, Staples 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.
Salesforce.com is a registered trademark of salesforce.com, and AppExchange, The Business Web, IdeaExchange and Successforce are trademarks of salesforce.com, Inc., San Francisco, California. Other names used may be trademarks of their respective owners.
(1) Positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the 'Magic Quadrant for Sales Force
Automation (SFA) 2007' by K. Rush and R. Desisto, June 29, 2007.
Source: salesforce.com CONTACT: Katy Dormer of salesforce.com, +1-415-901-8595, kdormer@salesforce.com Web site: www.salesforce.com/
