Salesforce.com Delivers New Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex to Enable Rich Internet Applications on the Force.com Platform


Developers can now harness the full power of Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex in Platform-as-a-Service applications

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25 -- Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, today announced the availability of the new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe® AIR(TM) and Flex, a new set of tools and services to enable development of rich Internet applications (RIAs) on salesforce.com's Force.com Platform. Freely available at developer.force.com/, the new toolkit will help developers create new RIAs that leverage the capabilities of Adobe RIA technologies, including Adobe Flex® 3, Adobe Flash® Player, and Adobe AIR software, with their Force.com projects and offerings. Developers can also publish applications built with Adobe Flex and deployed on Adobe AIR on the AppExchange marketplace, making them immediately available to salesforce.com's customer and developer communities.

The new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex brings the power of Platform-as-a-Service to Adobe RIA technologies. With the toolkit, Flex developers now have direct access to the Force.com Web services API, allowing the easy creation of new user experiences and web applications that connect directly to Force.com's database, logic and workflow capabilities. And using the Adobe AIR component in the toolkit, information from Force.com can automatically be made available offline, allowing developers to extend their Force.com applications with Adobe AIR, bridging the real-time, dynamic capabilities of the Web with the computing power and data capabilities of the desktop.

"The new generation of platform and tools from companies like salesforce.com and Adobe is ushering in a new era of application development," said Adam Gross, vice president, platform marketing, salesforce.com. "Now Flex and other Web developers deploying on Adobe AIR have access to the full Platform-as-a-Service Force.com provides, allowing the capabilities of rich Internet applications -- already demonstrated in the consumer web -- to be easily united with the enterprise benefits of cloud computing. The opportunity for developers to create powerful and compelling applications for their businesses has never been greater."

"The ability to use Flex along with the Force.com Platform has allowed us to rapidly develop and deploy new, visually compelling on-demand applications for our clients," said Narinder Singh, co-founder, Appirio. "We plan to leverage the Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex to develop additional applications with a powerful user experience that drives adoption and business results for our customers."

"Using the new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex, we have been able to create business applications that not only leverage the power of platform-as-a-service, but also are available both online and offline, and meet unique business requirements such as signature capture," says Adam Caplan, president of Model Metrics. "These applications can be deployed to thousands of users without the need to deploy a single server. Using Force.com and the new toolkit, it is as easy to deploy these applications as it is to create them."

"Adobe RIA technologies and Force.com are a powerful combination," said Michele Turner, vice president of product marketing and product management at Adobe. "Blending the leading technology platform for RIAs with the leading on-demand application platform means more effective, engaging applications delivered with less effort. We're entering an era in which developers can deliver truly rich enterprise applications on-demand, across platforms, both in the browser with Adobe Flash Player and now directly on the desktop with Adobe AIR."

The new toolkit joins the comprehensive set of resources and programs salesforce.com offers to let companies of all sizes create, deploy and sell on-demand applications for any business requirement. These include developer.force.com, salesforce.com's community of over 70,000 developers at developer.force.com/, the Force.com Platform for creating apps, and the AppExchange marketplace for helping partners reach the salesforce.com customer base with their applications.

Force.com Platform and the AppExchange
Force.com (http://www.force.com/) reinvents the traditional development, deployment and distribution of any business application with platform-as-a-service. Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create a new generation of on-demand applications and deploy them worldwide as a service. Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace, enabling all the innovation that Force.com unleashes to be easily distributed to the entire on-demand community.

The AppExchange economy continues to expand, with thousands of customers installing applications via the AppExchange. Customers of all sizes can quickly and easily extend Salesforce with additional on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at http://salesforce.com/appexchange/.

About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The company's portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM, available at www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that customers manage and share business information over the Internet. The company's Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful on-demand applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com platform, available at www.force.com/, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace available at http://salesforce.com/appexchange/.

As of October 31, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 38,100 customers including ABN AMRO, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, Sprint Nextel, and SunTrust Banks. 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.

Source: Salesforce.com, Inc.

CONTACT: Gordon Evans of Salesforce.com, Inc.
+1-415-536-7608,
gevans@salesforce.com

Web site: http://www.salesforce.com/
http://www.force.com/
http://developer.force.com/
http://salesforce.com/appexchange

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