The buzzwords that get smacked around the Internet like so many shuttlecocks at an Olympic badminton event, like “web-based apps,” “software as a service,” and “web services” have become more than just promising statements of the future of productivity. Those promises are being fulfilled today.

Salesforce has been running its Dreamforce Conference this week, and somewhere company CEO Marc Benioff must be smiling. The AppExchange maintained by Salesforce offers over 400 applications that people like our readers use each day.

During the Conference, Benioff and company announced Apex, their new multi-tenant, shared architecture.

“Apex will unleash a new level of innovation as we provide salesforce.com’s on-demand infrastructure to developers worldwide as a service,” said Benioff. “No hardware, software, data centers, or infrastructure of any kind will be needed to build, distribute, and deliver on-demand applications: Apex and the AppExchange will make it all possible.”

More came from their statement:

Rough Type blogger Nicholas Carr cited a new understanding of Salesforce.com’s motives with regards to the announcement:

As Carr noted, that competition includes Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. All three companies have taken steps toward being the center of the universe when it comes to freeing applications from the desktop.

ZDNet’s Between The Lines blogger Dan Farber splashed some cold water on the announcement, as he remarked on a message from Salesforce competitor NetSuite:

With that kind of chippy eagerness to outdo each other, customers of firms like Salesforce should benefit from the ongoing battle to deliver solid, effective applications. Salesforce and the others do need to watch out for feature creep, to avoid packing too much unneeded functionality into a service.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Available for mySAP Business Suite applications, Intalio/APEX lets organizations quickly and cost-effectively consolidate multiple instances of mySAP.com, integrate new mySAP.com modules or upgrade to mySAP.com or SAP R/3 4.7. Built on top of Intalio/n3 3.0, the newest version of its trailblazing Business Process Management System (BPMS), Intalio/APEX recently earned the Powered by SAP NetWeaver certification.

“Enterprise applications are the new legacy — too expensive to maintain, yet too entrenched to displace,” said Intalio’s president and chief strategy officer, Ismael Ghalimi. “We estimate Intalio/APEX will reduce the cost of development and maintenance of extended SAP business processes by up to 75 percent, while giving SAP users a way to leverage their existing IT assets and improve business agility.”

With Intalio/APEX, SAP customers can extend SAP software processes outside of their host applications, without ever writing code, to gain best-in-class business processes and move closer to the next generation of mySAP.com architecture. Technical and non-technical SAP users can work with Intalio/APEX to reduce their total cost of ownership of their SAP applications, while accommodating changes to the core business processes that they were originally deployed to support.

Emergence of the APEX Market

APEX, or Application Process Extension, responds to a fundamental challenge enterprise applications present most customers: deployed straight out of the box, enterprise applications fail to meet each customer’s particular needs. As a result, customers must tailor the off-the-shelf offerings to reflect their unique ways of doing business.

While such customizations work when made to business objects only, they falter when made to complex business processes that span multiple business objects and applications. In turn, many deployments go over time and over budget. Meanwhile, the associated cost of maintenance for such customization, especially for an upgrade, can dramatically impact total cost of ownership and compromise overall return on investment. The maintenance and consolidation of existing systems and applications usually accounts for up to 85% of today’s IT budgets.

To consolidate multiple mySAP.com instances, a company faces the costly and disruptive prospect of re-engineering its business processes to align with those of the application. The alternative — customizing the mySAP.com master instance — entails expensive, time-consuming ABAP programming that must be carried forward with each SAP upgrade.

Integrating new mySAP.com modules requires expensive integration efforts, especially with cross-functional processes that span modules. The mySAP.com modules offer limited, out-of-the-box, cross-application, business process integration. Likewise, companies pay a steep price to modify their existing end-user workflows. Similarly, companies upgrading to mySAP.com or SAP R/3 4.7 are hit with the high costs associated with re-implementing any existing customization in the new version.

Enter Intalio/APEX

Intalio offers a compelling answer for SAP customers looking to keep their SAP projects on time and on budget. When consolidating multiple mySAP.com instances, Intalio/APEX lets users extend the processes of the master instance to reduce the need for process re-engineering and keep traditional ABAP customization to a minimum.

SAP shops integrating new mySAP.com modules can use Intalio/APEX to automate cross-functional processes to increase the value of new module deployment, while slashing process integration costs. For those upgrading to mySAP.com (or SAP R/3 4.7), Intalio/APEX extends mySAP.com processes to simplify the migration of existing customization and significantly reduce code development.

Intalio/APEX has been developed on top of Intalio/n3, the only standards-based and platform-neutral Business Process Management System (BPMS). Powered by SAP NetWeaver, Intalio/APEX does not compete with SAP NetWeaver. Rather, Intalio/APEX complements existing SAP NetWeaver solutions by extending them with an application process extension development and runtime environment.

Intalio/APEX runs on top of SAP Web Application Server, and uses SAP Exchange Infrastructure for connectivity to SAP and non-SAP applications, as well as business partners. It leverages the SAP Enterprise Portal for end-user interfaces developed with SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio, leverages SAP Master Data Management for service abstraction, and integrates bi-directionally with SAP Solution Manager, which is used for specification and configuration, while Intalio/APEX is used for extension.

In one tool and runtime package, Intalio/APEX lets users build processes that include system-to-system, system-to-human, and human-to-human transactions. No expertise with SAP Business Workflow, aka SAP WebFlow, is necessary. Intalio/APEX coordinates distributed transactions across multiple instances and modules, as well as supports human workflows for SAP and non-SAP users, who are notified of tasks through SAP Enterprise Portal or any email client.

Functioning as an integrated process development environment, Intalio/APEX covers the entire lifecycle from discovery to implementation to testing. It supports the dynamic introspection of BAPIs, IDOCs, RFCs, and tables to immediately make these resources available for use as Web services. Intalio/APEX includes process maps of 1,800 mySAP.com reference models and features Intalio’s ground-breaking Zero-Code Development methodology and a One-Click Deployment architecture to address the needs of process designers.

ERP Update provides articles, insights and commentary on enterprise resource planning issues.

Apex IT selected PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9 to replace its existing Siebel system. As a result of the implementation, Apex IT now has a CRM solution with unmatched usability that provides greater sales visibility across the enterprise.

“Low user adoption was the top reason we replaced our Siebel sales solution,” said Chris Rapp, vice president of Sales and Marketing for Apex IT. “The usability of PeopleSoft CRM 8.9 made it the clear alternative. Equally important to us was the ability to quickly implement the product. PeopleSoft CRM 8.9 Sales exceeded our needs out-of-the-box.”

Apex IT chose to replace its Siebel product with PeopleSoft Enterprise Sales for three primary reasons:

– Greater usability. With low user adoption of its Siebel system, Apex IT chose PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9 for its industry-leading usability. Featuring role-based launch pages, call reports and streamlined contact management, intuitive navigation and other user-friendly features, PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9 delivers extensive usability enhancements and industry-leading usage rates.

– Flexibility. With a distributed sales force, a long sales cycle, and multiple opportunities and touch points within individual customer accounts, Apex IT needed a solution that would meet their forecasting and pipeline-management requirements. The flexibility of PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9 Sales resulted in a perfect fit for the company’s sales model.

– Fast time-to-benefit. The out-of-the-box capabilities of CRM 8.9 Sales enabled the company to shorten its implementation cycle and deploy an Apex IT-configured solution that is easier to use and maintain.

“PeopleSoft CRM continues to win in the market place with its best-in-class usability, functionality, and integration capabilities,” said George Ahn, group vice president and general manager of PeopleSoft CRM. “With PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9 we deliver an even greater total ownership experience with a 38 percent improvement in usability, 46 percent reduction in clicks required to perform business tasks, and 30 percent faster performance.”

PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9 Sales began shipping in June with the release of PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM 8.9. New features of the solution include:

– Strategic Account Planning, which enables companies to align their sales strategy with customer needs and corporate objectives.

– PeopleSoft Prescriptive Analytics, an embedded decision engine that triggers alerts and recommended actions at every point of interaction.

– Enhanced integration to PeopleSoft Enterprise Supply Chain Management, Fulfillment, and Financial Management solutions. With PeopleSoft’s pre-built integration, companies can manage orders from lead to cash.

CRMNewz focuses on business software strategies that provide competitive advantage by improving business decision-making, enhancing business performance, and maximizing the lifetime value of customer relationships.