Salesforce.com Heats up Enterprise CRM with Salesforce Summer '07, Based on World's First Platform-as-a-Service
With Apex Code live to customers, the era of platform-as-a-service begins
New standard for the "IT-ready" on-demand platform combines multi-tenant programming
language, multi-instance development environment, and intelligent workflow
Salesforce.com positioned in Leaders Quadrant in SFA Magic Quadrant 2007; establishes
new milestones as the industry's most customized, integrated, and adopted enterprise CRM
MELBOURNE - salesforce.com Summer '07 Launch Event - July 16, 2007 - 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 the creation of
a whole 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.
The AppExchange economy continues to expand as thousands of salesforce.com customers have
installed thousands of on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at
http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.
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 the creation of
a whole 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.
The AppExchange economy continues to expand as thousands of salesforce.com customers have
installed thousands of on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at
http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.
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