Salesforce.com will undergo its seasonal Summer ‘06 upgrade on Monday and has released information for the first time about a developers component at their annual users conference.
This year’s Dreamforce conference will include a sub-conference October 9-11th for Web 2.0 developers interested in moving out of the consumer sector and into bringing applications to market for business use.
The Summer ‘06 seasonal upgrade of Salesforce will see general enhancements and include the following highlights:
- SAP integration, a means of connecting on-premises SAP databases with web based Salesforce.
- Partnerforce, a system for managing resellers.
- Scripting module, as in scripted dialogue not program scripts, for use in scripting customer interactions through a series of logical steps for categorization.
- Service entitlements, a feature for managing service levels as appropriate for your customers of variable degrees of ritzyness.
The company is also announcing that it has now seen 10,000 customer installations of 280 applications through its AppExchange, a community for outside developers seeking to integrate with Salesforce.
More on Salesforce here.
I was pleasantly surprised to see something about salesforce.com on TechCrunch. Most people don’t immediately think of Salesforce when they think “Web 2.0″, but I think it’s got enough AJAX, Ruby on Rails, and Saas cred to qualify. But for the purists left doubting that SFDC belongs sandwiched between Odeo and FeedBurner on TechCrunch, there are always the RESTful, GData-ish, Atom 1.0 feeds you can get from salesforce.com using Spanning Salesforce (http://spanningsalesforce.com).
SalesForce’s AppExchange is a joke.
They have a tendency to release inflated numbers to drive traffic and talk. As an example, 10,000 customer installations includes things like a developer installing the application they just created in order to test it…. 15 times. Also, 90% of the applications that have been installed are free “plug-in” applications that SF created to build traction. I, as an example, have installed roughly 20 different appexchange applications myself, several of which were applications with a monthly fee, but because I never completed the buying process, the application sits, dead and useless, in my account but is still claimed as an “installation”.
To be frank, I would take anything they release with a grain of salt. AppExchange is a great idea, but the SF platform is not conducive to actual development, and is, at best, a platform to sell b2b applications through an iframe.
Just as an example, if you’d like to allow non-enterprise users (enterprise licenses run >$100 per month per user) to use your application, you must pay a $10,000 “certification fee”. Even then, your end users end up paying ~$70 per month for the professional edition license, plus the fees for your application.
It’s just not going to work.
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