Salesforce.com boosts CRM integration |
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By Barney Beal, News Director
27 Nov 2006 | SearchCRM.com |
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Continuing to promote its integration capabilities, Salesforce.com today detailed new features in its ApexConnect set of applications.
Based on Apex, Salesforce.com's on-demand programming language, ApexConnect integrates the company's CRM tools with customers' legacy applications, Web services and other on-demand applications, and carries those integrations forward through upgrades to the Salesforce.com system. The San Francisco-based company has increasingly been expanding beyond just CRM into a platform for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, thanks partly to the AppExchange, its online directory of on-demand tools based on its Application Programming Interface (API).
It's a strategy that seems to be working, according to the company. During Salesforce.com's most recent fiscal quarter, the number of API transactions surpassed the number of page views on its CRM service for the first time.
"It is a sign that they're moving more toward becoming a platform company," said Liz Herbert, analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. "It's probably a sign of them also moving up market."
Built largely through serving smaller companies looking to get a CRM system up and running quickly, Salesforce.com is finding some success in larger enterprises. The company plans to release ConnectOracle, prebuilt integration with the Oracle 11i database, early next year for a $12,000 annual fee. The company already has an SAP R/3 connectorand integration with Microsoft Office, Outlook and Lotus Notes.
Salesforce.com is shifting much of the integration work from customers to its partners, according to Ariel Kelman, senior director, platform product marketing, who cited recent research from Gartner Inc. which found that integrating data can amount to 35% of typical IT costs in a large company.
"Multi-tenant can address other key areas of IT pain and that's integration," Kelman said.
The ApexConnect program also features integration with a number of partners, including middleware vendors such as AboveAll and Informatica.
"People are looking to do heavier integration with SAP and Oracle," Herbert said. "These connectors were a starting point. In the past, they were doing a lot more point-to-point integrations. There's demand for the integration at a reasonable cost and reasonable time frame. I like that they're partnering with the integration specialists who can help."
The company also detailed its ConnectOut feature, which will become available as part of the Winter '07 release. ConnectOut will enable on-demand outbound messaging from Salesforce.com to other applications, middleware or a message bus. For example, if a salesperson reaches 150% of goal, the system can send a notification to Human Resources to order the appropriate rewards incentive. Or complex business processes that require input from multiple applications will be able to monitor Salesforce.com for triggers, rather than repeatedly having to poll the system.
"This is going to get them closer to complex real-time integration," Herbert said. "That's an issue with our large enterprise clients with complex needs. When they are doing on-demand integration, there are not a lot of examples of it being real time."
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