Now develop apps on Salesforce too
Posted on January 10, 2008
Filed Under Software, Trends |
Do you use Salesforce? And Google’s AdWords as an advertising medium? How would you like to connect to your AdWords account from Salesforce, correlate web clicks with inbound leads and be able to measure the effectiveness and ROI of your Google campaigns? It is possible through the ‘Salesforce for Google Adwords,’ a highly rated and one of the most downloaded application on Salesforce AppExchange On-Demand Marketplace.
While it is interesting enough to be able to do so, what is even more significant is the fact that this application could have been developed independently outside of Salesforce and offered on this platform. Because, with Facebook and Google showing the way, the big trend that could unfold in the coming years is that of independent developers plugging in their applications on existing platforms. And Salesforce, the world leader in on-demand CRM services, is ensuring it is not left behind.
Doug Farber, Vice President of Operations Asia Pacific, in a chat with me during his recent visit to Delhi, said the company has taken this step to unleash the wisdom of the crowds and the creativity of their customers and partners. Call it the democratic way of doing business, but companies are realizing this may just be the way to the next big jump on the growth curve.
“The last few months of 2007 have heralded a sea change for Internet platforms,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com, in a release. “The industry has rallied around the concept of platform-as-a-service with companies like Facebook and Google changing the way consumer applications are built and delivered on the Internet. We are thrilled to be at the forefront of this trend for businesses by delivering Force.com Platform-as-a-Service to revolutionize how enterprise applications are developed and delivered,” he added.
The Force.com Platform-as-a-Service offers a comprehensive set of capabilities for building any application on demand, providing the building blocks necessary to create and deploy any business application and letting companies and developers focus on what their applications do, rather than the software and infrastructure to run them. By replacing the complexity of software platforms with a complete, scalable service, Force.com provides developers the fastest path to turn ideas into business impact. The multi-tenant Force.com platform encompasses a complete feature set for the creation of business applications, including the ability to create any database on demand, a workflow engine for managing collaboration between users, the Apex Code programming language for building complex logic, the Force.com Web Services API for programmatic access, mash-ups, and integration with other applications and data, and Visualforce for a framework to build any user interface.
Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create a new generation of on-demand applications and deploy them worldwide as a service. Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via Salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace, enabling all the innovation that Force.com unleashes to be easily distributed to the entire on-demand community.
Mr. Farber added that Salesforce has already set up an incubator in Silicon Valley where applications are being developed. The AppExchange has already seen over 750 applications so far, with 60,000 plus downloads and 250,000 test drives. The publisher of each of these apps decides whether they are free or to be charged.
Channels like Salesforce are now open – if you have the right ideas, go ahead and use these to distribute any application you develop. It’s early days yet – and the advantage may lie with the first movers.
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