Salesforce.com's New AppExchange Developer Network Empowers Developers to Create Applications for The Business Web™

SAN DIEGO — O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference — March 7, 2006 — Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the technology and market leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, today announced the AppExchange Developer Network (http://developer.appexchange.com), a new Web site that provides the community, tools and resources to let developers build new applications for the AppExchange. Now any developer in the world — with access to just a Web browser and Internet connection — can harness the power of the world's most popular on-demand platform to create new applications from scratch. With toolkits and resources for most popular development languages, including AJAX, Java, .NET and PHP, developers can also combine those applications with other Internet services to create new business mashups, allowing developers, ISVs and IT organizations to easily leverage The Business Web in their projects and offerings.

The AppExchange Developer Network offers developers everything related to building, coding, integrating and sharing on-demand applications with the AppExchange platform, including free and public access to API documentation, code samples, community projects and a complete on-demand development environment. In addition, online presentations, community forums and podcasts available at the site provide the resources to learn how to use the platform and build new development skills. The AppExchange Developer Network gives companies and ISVs a new option for building business applications, giving developers access to the same success that salesforce.com's 20,500 customers and 399,000 subscribers already have experienced with on-demand computing.

"The Internet has changed the technology of business applications, allowing developers access to innovation and productivity unimagined in the software-centric platforms that preceded it," said Adam Gross, vice president, developer marketing, salesforce.com. "The AppExchange Developer Network provides the community and tools for developers to learn about on demand, build applications for this new model, and share their results with the world."

As part of the AppExchange Developer Network, salesforce.com is announcing the immediate availability of new toolkits and services, including:

• Ruby on Rails Toolkit for AppExchange: This new extension to the Web development environment lets developers access their AppExchange data directly within Rails, with the same features and support that Rails currently provides for traditional databases.
• PHP Toolkit for AppExchange: The new PHP Toolkit lets developers familiar with this popular scripting language access the AppExchange Web services API without requiring new skills or programming techniques, letting them quickly start building PHP-based AppExchange applications.
• Developer Edition: This free version of Salesforce provides developers a fully featured development environment to create new applications and publish them to the AppExchange.

"Being a long time developer and provider of open source products, I can appreciate how much building applications has evolved, and what great opportunity there is to create new on-demand business applications today," said Bill Emerson, CTO, forceAmp.com, LLC. "The AppExchange Developer Network provides a fantastic resource and energetic community to help me make the most of this opportunity. Salesforce.com is demonstrating to developers the same commitment to success it shows its customers."

"We applaud salesforce.com for recognizing the profound business value to its customers of providing open API's," said Mark de Visser, Chief Marketing Officer at Zend. "We witness daily what innovation is possible if PHP developers can remix the information contained in their enterprise IT systems like Salesforce. We are working closely with salesforce.com to make sure that the PHP integration is seamless and productive."

The new PHP and Ruby on Rails Toolkits for AppExchange include sample code, tools, plug-ins and examples for developers. They complement the existing AppExchange Developer Network Toolkits and samples for AJAX, Borland JBuilder X, IBM Websphere, Java, Microsoft ASP, C# and .NET, the AppExchange Telephony API and more. Developers interested in using the toolkits and the AppExchange on-demand platform available can sign up for a free Developer Edition at http://developer.appexchange.com.