WebProNews » AppExchange

An iPod Tree And The Android Story

Chris Crum — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:47:00 +0000

In today’s infographic round-up, we get a couple of evolutionary tales about rivals Apple and Google. One focuses on ten years of the iPod, and the other is about the Android Story. As an added bonus, we threw one in from Salesforce about AppExchange surpassing 1 million installs.

View more infographic round-ups here.

Cult of Mac looks at the life of the iPod:

[x]Cube Labs looks at The Android Story:

Finally, Salesforce shared this one about AppExchange surpassing 1,000,000 installs:

Salesforce.com Lets Apex Fly

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 19:55:23 +0000

Third party developers can write applications that will run on the Salesforce.com architecture, as enabled through the Apex language and platform.

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:

Customers and developers will be able to use the full power of Apex to do everything from creating custom components, customizing and modifying existing salesforce.com code, and creating triggers and stored procedures, all the way to building and executing complex business logic, run entirely on salesforce.com’s multi-tenant service.

Apex will be a Java-like development language that is secure, easy and fast, and will be immediately familiar to any Java programmer. Anything built using Apex can be made available as a Web service and is accessible via SOAP and XML standards.

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

Last year, I questioned Salesforce’s decision to run its software-as-a-service application on its own infrastructure rather than have that infrastructure hosted by a hardware utility. Now, I understand the rationale for the decision: the infrastructure is the product. While Salesforce’s move opens up new opportunities for the firm, it also dramatically widens the competition it will face.

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:

As Benioff was heading on stage, I received an email from Zach Nelson, CEO of salesforce.com competitor NetSuite, who took issue with the salesforce.com claim that it is creating the world’s first on-demand pogramming language and platform. “It’s a shameless lie. We introduced SuiteScript, the first on-demand programming language, six months ago, and its predecessor (NetSuite Custom Code) over a year ago,” Nelson said.

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.

Basecamp Integrates with Harvest

Ken Yarmosh — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:45:28 +0000

In a world of more focused or niche based web services such as Harvest, integrations are going to continue to be key (as I’ve noted in the past).

Time tracking tool Harvest is now integrating with Basecamp. From the Harvest Gazette:

If your organization currently uses Basecamp in conjunction with Harvest for time tracking, things just got a whole lot easier. Harvest admins can now avoid any form of double-entry when it comes to setting up users, clients, or projects. Simply pick the people or projects you’d like to import from Basecamp and you are ready to go. Imported users will receive an automatically-generated Harvest welcome message along with their temporary password.

Basecamp is in many ways set to be what SalesForce’s AppExchange is becoming in the CRM space – one of the definitive places for project management based integrations.

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Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

Salesforce Adds New CRM Features To Winter ’07

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 20:56:54 +0000

Salesforce.com announced new customization features of Winter ’07, including full componentization of its analytical dashboards aimed at allowing users to create, share, and combine new components that analyze and present data from Salesforce.

In a joint announcement Business Objects is integrating Crystal Xcelsius within the new Salesforce dashboard framework, available in the Winter ’07 release, as the first partner to participate in this new analytics mash-up category. Both announcements were made at a salesforce.com AppExchange event in London where Crystal Xcelsius was demonstrated. Salesforce Winter ’07 is scheduled for availability in the fourth quarter.

The addition of Crystal Xcelsius is said to provide an interactive visualization solution to help better present business data to customers, prospects and colleagues. Customers can choose the analytical components from several companies and combine them into a single view or dashboard.

“Business Objects is continuing to demonstrate our vision of providing the best business intelligence solutions for customers regardless of deployment model,” said Steve Lucas, vice president of strategic markets at Business Objects.

“Crystal Xcelsius within the new Salesforce dashboard framework, available in the Winter ’07 release, will provide our joint customers with the most advanced, stunning graphic visualization of their business data, while providing what-if analysis and full interactivity with live company data.”

“Salesforce Winter ’07 will continue to deliver on unlimited customization, delivering new levels of granular control and creativity for customer to create unique reports, dashboards, and analytics,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com.

“This new level of freedom and flexibility is only possible through the power of mash-ups, open APIs and Web services on which salesforce.com is built. This new open strategy for mash-up analytics and dashboards continues the shift away from monolithic stacks and toward heterogeneous Web services.”

Winter ’07, salesforce.com includes the AppExchange multi-tenant on-demand platform and directory and combines them to create customized dashboards. Users can create “what-if” scenarios, do supply-chain analysis, Web analytics, profit analysis.

Salesforce.com will preview “Unlimited Customization” of Winter ’07 applications and AppExchange platform at Dreamforce ’06. The industry’s largest on-demand event, Dreamforce ’06 will be held October 8-11 at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco.

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Microsoft Talks CRM, Benioff Laughs Heartily

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 16:58:35 +0000

All that CRM momentum Microsoft has been touting for the forthcoming software-as-a-service CRM Live elicited a chuckle and a “Microsoft is being out hustled by everyone” comment from Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

Microsoft (MSFT) announced its CRM Live product, part of the Microsoft Dynamics family, at a Worldwide Partners Conference 2006 in Boston today. Three-thousand miles away in San Francisco, mailing list recipients at Salesforce.com (CRM) joined in Benioff’s speculation about the future: “Is this the end of software as we know it?”

Benioff seems to feel fine about the future. So does Microsoft, which brought out CRM Live in friendly surroundings. “We believe in the power of software plus services, and today’s introduction of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live is another example of our delivering against that vision,” said Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft.

“Microsoft CRM Live will provide a software-as-a-service option for deploying our leading CRM solution and will also afford partners new opportunities to deliver their value-added services.”

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has been a concept occupying Benioff and Salesforce, especially since they launched AppExchange in January of this year. Benioff talked more about SaaS in his email:

The world has changed. Everyone and everything is becoming a service.

It was not so long ago that most executives and companies disregarded the movement to software as service, claiming it was limited technically, or isolated to a specific market segment such as small business. Now, everyone agrees that the future of software is no software at all—but rather an industry dominated by tens of thousands of heterogeneous services delivering everything from traditional Office productivity to Verticals to VOIP to ERP and CRM systems.

Benioff called this “the Business Web. And The Business Web– with all of its innovation, creativity, and most important, customer success-won’t wait for Microsoft.”

Microsoft is not waiting either. Ray Ozzie has taken over for Bill Gates as chief software architect at the company. That means Microsoft has a shift under way to SaaS as well, with Ozzie plotting that new course.

The mobile sector will have an open source client available in August from Microsoft to connect with the company’s CRM products; however, CRM Live will not arrive until the second quarter of 2007.

Benioff sees the various SaaS offerings that compete directly with Microsoft, like hosted email servers from Google and Yahoo, and online productivity alternatives to Office like Writely, NumSum, and Google Spreadsheets. He could have mentioned Yahoo’s Mail Beta as well; it’s virtually a clone of Microsoft Outlook.

We aren’t entirely convinced the online competitors to Word and Excel pose a serious threat to Office yet. File format compatibility isn’t the same as having comparable feature sets. Criticisms of bloat in Office can probably be countered by someone, somewhere, who asked for a particular feature somewhere during Office’s development lifetime.

That doesn’t minimize the importance of SaaS. Microsoft thinks it’s important enough to redirect resources to it, even in the face of criticism that it takes the company away from its core revenue streams of Office and Windows.

If Benioff is right, SaaS is even more important than Microsoft believes:

It will not be dominated by any one particular company or application or geography. The reason is that The Business Web will be best known for its ability to easily create composite applications, or what is now popularly known as “mash-ups.”

No one can turn back time, and the Pandora’s box of services is now opened. New companies being funded on Sand Hill Road are not software companies but services companies. And, entrepreneurs around the world are starting their own companies to take on this great new opportunity of creating The Business Web.

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

AppExchange Adds eBridge ERP Option

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 14:34:11 +0000

The Enterprise Resource Planning Integration Solution provided by eBridge Software joins the 250+ applications at Salesforce.com’s AppExchange site.

The eBridge for AppExchange application has joined the assortment of software available from Salesforce through its dedicated on-demand apps website. People interested in trying out the ERP Integration Solution from eBridge can obtain the demo from AppExchange and have it available within Salesforce.

Support for over three-dozen accounting packages from major vendors like Sage, QuickBooks, and Microsoft allows eBridge to deliver accounting information like inventory, customer credit rating, and invoice status.

Information also travels back to the accounting system as the sales team enters sales. The integration provides real-time synchronization between systems. That helps to eliminate the potential for duplicate entries and similar errors.

The application lets the business provide better service to its customers. With one application maintaining up to date information, a business can answer questions on the accounting or sales sides of the operation with the most accurate data available.

For example, when a salesperson designates a transaction in the system as Closed Won, eBridge creates a pending invoice in the accounting system for the customer.

“The success of the AppExchange in distributing and marketing applications provides eBridge a great opportunity to offer additional value to salesforce.com customers,” Cindy Porter, Director of Marketing at eBridge Software, said in a statement.

ERP has long been a resource for sizable corporations, and priced accordingly. The applications available through AppExchange bring those high-powered capabilities to small-to-medium sized businesses, and offer the opportunity to more effectively manage a growing business.

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

JotSpot Tracker Integrating With Salesforce

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 25 May 2006 17:47:27 +0000

The first of several on-demand applications available from JotSpot through Salesforce’s AppExchange will transform Excel spreadsheets into browser-accessible versions.

Offering JotSpot Tracker through the AppExchange provided by Salesforce provides users with access to what is probably the most heavily used software application in business: the Excel spreadsheet.

Through use of JotSpot Tracker, information from a spreadsheet can be brought into a web-based spreadsheet, manipulated as needed, and exported back into Excel whenever it is needed. An announcement at the Appforce Conference for AppExchange users and members revealed details of the deal:

Typically, team members return to the old method of using and emailing Excel spreadsheets to keep track of project schedules, client contact lists, and key account resources. These files get updated by various team members and then re-emailed, creating the problems of multiple and out-of-date versions, the inability to access these files remotely, and the likelihood that files get locked away on individual’s computers.

“We have seen growing adoption of JotSpot Tracker since its launch in January 2006,” said Joe Kraus, co-founder and CEO, JotSpot. “This is the first of several on-demand services we plan to deliver for salesforce.com’s AppExchange.”

It is interesting to watch the transition of a workforce from the client/server mainframe-centric model of the 70s and 80s to the PC-based network through the 90s, and back to a centralized model in the 21st Century.

The technology offered by JotSpot and Salesforce do make a compelling argument in favor of the web-centric approach. If they can meet reliability and accessibility needs of their userbase, something that has been a problem for Salesforce in the past, they will be able to make a more effective pitch to businesses.

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Salesforce.com Deploys AppExchange

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:18:12 +0000

The AppExchange Developer Network provides services related to building, coding, integrating and sharing on-demand applications with the platform Salesforce announced in San Diego.

A web browser and an online connection can deliver the AppExchange Developer Network (ADN) to any developer, CRM firm Salesforce.com disclosed Tuesday at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

ADN toolkits and resources for development include projects like AJAX, Borland JBuilder X, IBM Websphere, Java, Microsoft ASP, C# and .NET, the AppExchange Telephony API and more. Also included are “free and public access to API documentation, code samples, community projects and a complete on-demand development environment.” Salesforce touted three toolkits they made available as part of today’s announcement:

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.

Salesforce Developer Edition: This free version of Salesforce provides developers a fully featured development environment to create new applications and publish them to the AppExchange.

Developers interested in using the toolkits and the AppExchange on-demand platform available can sign up for a free Developer Edition at the website.

Salesforce staffer Saul Weiner expressed on his blog an observation of how B-B and B-C markets get different attention from the Web2.0 crowd in his post about the AppExchange debut and its coverage:

… it’s always nice to see the work that we do get some attention in the B-B world get some attention from the web2.0 folks. Sometimes the focus is so heavily on B-C products, that the B-B folks, who have a lot bigger and more demanding customers get left behind in the news.

While the business web may lag the consumer web, the kinds of innovation are generally different. In this case, Salesforce is building a mashup and development platform for ‘the rest of us’.

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

Salesforce.com Entering Application Sales Arena

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:05:26 +0000

Amazon.com has been noted previously as developing a marketplace for software application services, while CRM suddenly becomes a hot concept.

In the span of a week, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce.com have ramped up their efforts in the CRM space. Salesforce believes it can further build on its model by offering AppExchange, a virtual center for testing and acquiring new applications to integrate into existing Salesforce.com installations, according to ZDNet.

Salesforce describes the service, destined for launch by the end of the year, like this:

“The AppExchange is the world’s first on-demand application-sharing service. It’s a new online center where salesforce.com subscribers, partners, and developers can share their on-demand applications for everything from handling expense management to tracking purchasing, monitoring recruiting, and beyond.”

Unlike Amazon’s efforts, Salesforce will focus on its own customers, as it now finds two big players trying to push their way further into the CRM market. Microsoft invited a number of mid-sized business types to Redmond last week for its inaugural Business Summit. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer spoke to attendees as Microsoft began a push to reach more smaller businesses with its software.

Oracle made the big play on Monday, announcing it had purchased Siebel Systems for $5.85 billion. That reunites Oracle head Larry Ellison with Tom Siebel, who was once Mr. Ellison’s top salesman at Oracle.

The battle over CRM, as it pertains to Microsoft and Oracle, has been cast by some sources as a fight for the database market. Oracle has been expanding into applications from its origins as a database company, while Microsoft went from just operating systems to adding applications like Office and SQL Server.

CRM software presents one more way for those companies to keep customers under a single brand umbrella. Microsoft doesn’t want to see new users of its Dynamics line running an Oracle database on the back end at the expense of client access licenses it could be selling to enterprises.

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

Salesforce.com Opens Online Marketplace for Applications

Chris Crum — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 15:25:07 +0000

Salesforce.com has launched an eBay style online marketplace called AppExchange for the buying and selling of applications between businesses.

AppExchange was created to allow Salesforce customers and third-party developers to exchange applications with each other.

The site features 8 different application categories, each with their own subcategories for the user to choose from, as well as application reviews, and a list of the most popular applications. Reuters writes:

Salesforce Founder and Chief Executive Marc Benioff introduced its AppExchange service that lets customers build and share software with other Salesforce users at a company user conference in San Francisco.

For example, Salesforce.com users could potentially twin the application with Google Maps to allow salespeople to pinpoint the locations of prospects.

Customers are able to test the applications featured at AppExchange before committing to them. All of them will run in the customer’s Salesforce.com platform.

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.