SalesForce Update

Techcrunch has the news from Salesforce.com:

"Salesforce.com will undergo its seasonal Summer ‘06 upgrade on Monday and has released information for the first time about a developers component at their annual users conference.

This year’s Dreamforce conference will include a sub-conference October 9-11th for Web 2.0 developers interested in moving out of the consumer sector and into bringing applications to market for business use.

The Summer ‘06 seasonal upgrade of Salesforce will see general enhancements and include the following highlights:

• SAP integration, a means of connecting on-premises SAP databases with web based Salesforce.
• Partnerforce, a system for managing resellers.
• Scripting module, as in scripted dialogue not program scripts, for use in scripting customer interactions through a series of logical steps for categorization.
• Service entitlements, a feature for managing service levels as appropriate for your customers of variable degrees of ritzyness.

The company is also announcing that it has now seen 10,000 customer installations of 280 applications through its AppExchange, a community for outside developers seeking to integrate with Salesforce."

IMHO: Well, well, well. Marc Benioff keeps upping the ante, doesn't he? Salesforce is once again making all the right noises. A big concern with SaaS so far has been the inabilityto integrate with on-premise solutions and extensibility. They are now trying to fix that. They are trying to involve the developer community, which is a great move coming after AppExchange for getting people talking about the technology (they already are, and it can only grow louder). Scripts and Service Entitlements, well, those are pretty standard feature of most SFA/ CRM solutions. But it demonstates that Salesforce is thinking about gaps and fixing them. Lets see how these are in action. The interesting question for me is: Will we see an on-premise version of salesforce? Any bets...?????

Category:Salesforce, SaaS