News Blogs - CNET News Salesforce.com next week intends to detail an extension to its Web-based developer platform that it claims will put it on par with traditional offline development tools. At the Dreamforce developer conference in San Francisco next week, company executives will introduce Force.com, the new name for a set of tools and hosted services for building hosted Web applications. It will also introduce an addition to its hosted development platform called Visualforce, a service that allows a developer to create a customized application user interface. Conference attendees will get access to a developer preview of Visualforce. Visualforce complements existing developer-oriented services, including , a language meant to speed up creation of applications that run on its platform. Whereas Salesforce.com applications are typically sold to salespeople, its Force.com development platform is aimed squarely at IT managers and chief information officers, said Gross.
Salesforce.com Industry Bad Boy Marc Benioff Salesforce.com Bad Boy SaaS Bad Boy Salesforce.com Whether making seemingly outlandish comments such as "Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft are the Packards and Dodges" of business software, doomed to irrelevance or publicly chastising Microsoft's recent software-as-a-service (SaaS) Titan release by referring to it as "Titanic", Salesforce.com CEO and industry commentator Marc Benioff does not mince words or shy away from media opportunity. Referred to as "The Biggest Mouth in Silicon Valley" by Erick Schonfeld of CNN, Marc Benioff is no stranger to making outlandish, and often insulting, comments. Party Crasher The tone for what was coming from Benioff and Salesforce.com seemed to begin on Feb. 22, 2000, when Benioff recalls he had "protesters" show up at the Siebel conference in San Francisco. Trash talker, blowhard or marketing genius?
Unwire Your Sales Force | Roundup Salespeople cannot be effective in today's competitive environment if they lack up-to-date information on their customers, accounts, and pending deals. Salespeople cannot be effective in today's competitive environment if they lack up-to-date information on their customers, accounts, and pending deals. New functions and features from sales-force automation heavyweights ACT! 6.0, Salesforce, Salesnet, and UpShot enhance that effectiveness with better off-line and wireless capabilities, tighter integration with Microsoft Outlook and back-office applications, and improved security for users on the road. Since mobile sales teams tend to spend more time off-line than in the office or connected to the Internet, we looked at each product with special attention to its off-line behavior. Web-based customer-relationship management (CRM) packages—Salesforce, Salesnet, and UpShot—have off-line versions to ensure that sales teams can still access their data after they disconnect.
Salesforce.com’s India Plans By Krishnan Subramanian on November 26, 2008 Salesforce.com is planning to invade Indian market. According to a report in the Industry Standard, Doug Farber, Vice President of Salesforce’s Asia Pacific operations, told the media that they are planning to focus on some select cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Gurgaon and Mumbai. They are hoping to slowly create awareness about cloud computing in India. The biggest drawback usually quoted against SaaS or Cloud adaption in India is the unreliable power and internet infrastructure. Bandwidth is a problem in India and everyone is aware of that. On top of the above mentioned solution, Salesforce can take comfort in the fact that India’s mobile infrastructure is fairly reliable and they have a decent mobile data network. I have spoken to several people in the small and medium business segments in India, including some in Pharma related business, about implementing CRM solutions. Is India Becoming The Next Cloud Destination? March 22, 2012
Salesforce.com Tells sforce Success Story Salesforce.com, which dubs itself “the world leader in delivering ‘software-as-service,’” says Canal Street Talent, the nation's largest talent agency for senior executives, “has used sforce to extend salesforce.com S3 to gain capabilities unique to the recruiting market.” Using sforce, Salesforce.com says, “the salesforce.com client/service application platform included with salesforce.com S3 at no additional charge, Canal Street Talent rapidly created a Web-accessible database to track executive job opportunities by location, function, level, and compensation. The company then integrated this database with executive client information tracked in salesforce.com S3, allowing for the rapid match of clients and opportunities. The Web services-based development process was completed in less than three weeks, delivering greater functionality and flexibility than the leading recruitment-specific vertical software solutions.”
Salesforce.com: The vision gets grander Posted by: Steve Hamm on March 18, 2005 Marc Benioff, the genial CEO of anti-software maker Salesforce.com, has a challenge that lots of other CEOs would envy. Over the past six years, as the San Francisco-based company grew from quirky infancy into a force to be reckoned with, he used his considerable PR skills to attract a ton of media attention and way more coverage than a company of that size would normally warrant. The new thing is Multiforce, which in his typical understatement, Benioff calls, “The first on-demand operating system.” Salesforce.com started off as a simple thing. Multiforce takes things a big step further. Benioff is so cock-sure about Multiforce's prospects that he violates one of the basic tenants of computerdom: Don't poke Microsoft in the eye. We'll see. In the meantime, Benioff has another dilemma.
Salesforce.com launch presages Siebel rivalry A David-and-Goliath battle of the Silicon Valley sort is expected to heat up with tonight's launch party for Salesforce.com. Chief executive Marc Benioff has big plans for the San Francisco company, which could one day go head to head with software giant Siebel Systems. Salesforce.com's new Web-based service gives salespeople tools to track leads and customer account information, build reports and compare their performance to the rest of the sales force. The difference between the two companies? Salesforce.com, founded in March 1999, is strictly an online service that customers buy---priced at about $50 a month for the first five users and $50 a month per each additional user--and access using a browser. The company's motto is "The end of software." Any upcoming battle between the two companies underscores a larger argument within the software industry: How quickly will business customers be willing to shift from buying to renting?