Salesforce Platform Edition gives Customers, Developers, and ISVs the Ability to Extend the Innovation, Usability and Success of On-demand Applications to Users Throughout the Enterprise
New on-demand multi-tenant platform available in OEM and end user versions
SAN FRANCISCO, April 23 Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced the availability of Salesforce Platform Edition, giving customers and ISVs the ability to deploy the Salesforce Platform independent of salesforce.com's traditional applications for the first time. Salesforce Platform Edition gives customers the ability to extend the innovation, usability and success of on-demand applications to users beyond CRM in departments such as human resources, IT, legal, finance, R&D, and more throughout the enterprise. Customers can choose to run applications from the AppExchange, as well as build and deploy custom on-demand applications with the full power and functionality of the Salesforce Platform.
"Salesforce Platform Edition heralds the arrival of salesforce.com as a platform company as well as an applications company," said Marc Benioff, salesforce.com chairman and CEO. "With Salesforce Platform Edition, customers can now easily extend the power, usability and success of on demand to every part of their enterprise. ISVs can deliver their applications to run directly on the Salesforce Platform Edition -- allowing our customers to manage and share all of their information on demand. Our recent win at Japan Post, Japan's largest financial institution, will be based on the Salesforce Platform, allowing Japan Post to build and deploy a variety of critical applications for their upcoming privatization at the end of this year."
"The Salesforce Platform Edition is an excellent solution for us to embrace, as we have employees who need access to the Salesforce Platform but do not require salesforce.com's CRM applications," said Douglas Menefee, CIO of The Schumacher Group, a nationwide Emergency Department Management firm headquartered in Louisiana. "In an effort to better support our contracting, recruiting, credentialing, and payroll departments we have leveraged the salesforce.com platform to deploy internally built applications as well as the third party solutions Apttus and Conga through the AppExchange."
Salesforce Platform Edition will further drive developer, partner and customer success on demand. Developers and partners can take advantage of a world-leading on-demand platform to build and deliver new applications beyond CRM on the AppExchange. Customers can use Salesforce Platform Edition to deploy new AppExchange applications and extend the trusted standard for on demand to users beyond CRM in their enterprise.
Empowering the Future of On-Demand Applications
Customers will be able to expand the success that they have found with Salesforce on-demand business applications far deeper into the enterprise with powerful applications never before possible on demand, including highly complex applications such as enterprise resource planning and inventory, highly transactional applications for those used in ecommerce, and highly intelligent applications such as those for yield management and financial services.
At the heart of the Salesforce Platform is one of the key innovations of salesforce.com: multi-tenancy. 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. The multi-tenant Salesforce Platform and applications are similar to consumer Web services 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.
Salesforce Platform Edition
With Salesforce Platform Edition, customers can run multiple applications within the same Salesforce instance, allowing all of a company's Salesforce applications to share a common security model, data model, and user interface. The multi-tenant platform encompasses a complete feature set for building business applications such as models and objects to manage data, a workflow engine for managing collaboration between users, a user interface model to handle forms and other interactions, Salesforce Code, and the Salesforce API for programmatic access, mash-ups, and integration with other applications and data. Features of the Salesforce platform include:
Salesforce ODOS: Salesforce On-Demand Operating System provides the capability to run multiple applications within a single Salesforce deployment, and share a common data model, security model and UI. While applications built on the Salesforce Platform are pre-integrated with Salesforce and each other by virtue of their common data model, administrators can control which users within a company have access to which applications and which data. Additionally, customers can take advantage of service delivery benefits that come with salesforce.com's proven infrastructure, including world-class security, trust and transparency, proven scale, performance tuning and monitoring, and disaster recovery services.
Salesforce DB: Provides the ability to create any database on demand, including the description of a sharing model for fine-grain data security control and built-in data history tracking for regulatory compliance.
Salesforce API: The Salesforce Web services API is one of the world's most widely used enterprise Web services, handling more than fifty percent of salesforce.com's 4.2 billion service transactions in salesforce.com's Q407. The Salesforce Web services API makes it possible to access and manage complex data relationships -- such as a set of information about an account, all the products they have bought, and all of their contacts -- in a single request.
Salesforce Builder: Meta-data-driven application development model that allows applications to be defined as declarative "blue prints," with no code required.
Salesforce Code: Salesforce Code extends the Salesforce Platform by introducing the ability to write code that runs on salesforce.com servers. This language makes possible the development of a new class of applications and features deployed entirely on demand. Salesforce Code is now in developer preview at http://developer.salesforce.com/.
Salesforce Analytics: Salesforce Platform Edition includes the same powerful analytic functionality found in Salesforce. This allows users to incorporate popular dashboards and analytics from Salesforce directly into their applications, including highly interactive visualizations of customer data and the ability to link dashboards together.
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 whole new generation of on-demand applications that go beyond client/server computing. All Salesforce Platform components and applications can 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 575 applications are now available on salesforce.com's AppExchange, the world's first on-demand application directory, found at salesforce.com/appexchange.
The Salesforce Code is available today for developer preview, and is currently scheduled to be available in beta to salesforce.com customers later in 2007.
Salesforce Platform Edition Pricing and Availability
Salesforce Platform Edition is now available in an OEM version for ISVs to build and deliver on-demand applications for their customers, and is also now available for new and existing salesforce.com customers at the Enterprise or Unlimited level.
Salesforce Platform OEM Edition (the embeddable version of the Salesforce Platform for ISVs) is $25 per user per month. OEM Edition includes the Salesforce Platform features and capabilities, and the ability to run an AppExchange application consisting of a maximum of 5 custom tabs and 50 custom objects.
Salesforce Platform Enterprise Edition (the platform capabilities supporting Salesforce Enterprise Edition) is $50 per user per month. The Enterprise version includes the Salesforce Platform features and capabilities, the ability to run up to 10 AppExchange applications, 25 custom tabs and 200 custom objects.
Salesforce Platform Unlimited Edition (the platform capabilities supporting Salesforce Unlimited Edition) is $100 per user per month and includes the Salesforce Platform features and capabilities, unlimited AppExchange applications and custom tabs, and 2,000 custom objects. The Unlimited version also includes Salesforce Sandbox, Premier Support, extra storage and Salesforce Mobile.
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 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 new components and applications built on the Salesforce Platform 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 January 31, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 29,800 customers and approximately 646,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis Budget Group, Inc, Dow Jones Newswires, 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.
Salesforce.com is a registered trademark of salesforce.com, and 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.
