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Salesforce.com Rolls Out Summer with ’05 Product LaunchBy ROBERT LIU TMCnet Wireless and Technology Columnist Wasting no time, Salesforce.com commemorated the first official day of summer by announcing the general availability of its on-demand Salesforce and Supportforce customer relationship management (CRM) solutions as well as the launch of its much-ballyhooed Multiforce 1.0, which it claims to be the world's first on-demand operating system. To support the launch, a cluster of Salesforce.com partners like Spoke Software and CanyonBridge announced integrated product offerings. More importantly, though, data processing solutions providers like Pervasive Software announced integration capabilities thanks to the Multiforce platform, which includes the Customforce 2.0 on-demand application customization tool and the Sforce 6.0 on-demand integration platform. But despite its billing as “the world's first on-demand operating system,” Multiforce 1.0 is hardly an OS in the traditional sense, as Salesforce.com Executive Vice President of Technology Parker Harris has admitted in a previous interview. While Multiforce 1.0 does help define data storage and retrieval, security and the user interface, it still doesn’t represent a full-scale file system and provides no drivers and hardware controls. What Multiforce 1.0 does accomplish, however, is it delivers on the company’s stated goal of bringing its Salesforce.com platform deeper into the enterprise delving into areas other than sales automation, opportunity/prospect management, contact management, etc. For example, contact center infrastructure providers including Avaya, Cisco Systems, Alcatel, Aspect Communications and Genesys Labs are trying to integrate their respective platforms with Supportforce. And Customforce 2.0 will allow users to customize (as the name implies) the Salesforce platform to areas such as expense reporting, project management, schedule management and even recruiting. "Summer '05's customizable forecasting will help increase confidence in sales forecasts and give us better visibility across our enterprise,” said Patricia Menadier, Director of Sales Operations, Macromedia. The launch underscores Salesforce.com’s latest efforts to prove skeptics wrong. While the company has staked its claim on the small- to medium-sized business market, it has faced sharp criticism that its platform has the enterprise-level capabilities to serving larger organizations with sales teams numbering in excess of 500 people. Not to be outdone, the CRM industry’s leading company (as measured by revenue) Siebel Systems on Tuesday announced that TraveLeaders, a fully integrated travel services distribution company, chose Siebel CRM OnDemand over Salesforce.com for its hosted CRM solution. ----- Robert Liu is executive editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was executive editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles by Robert Liu, please visit: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100002&nm=Robert%2 0Liu |