Salesforce Platform Edition Has Arrived

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post suggesting Salesforce offer a “Platform Edition” that offers the Apex platform to companies/developers, but excludes CRM from it.

In a press release today, Salesforce announced that it will now be offered. The offering sounds very similar (except more expensive 🙂 ) to what I wrote about a year ago. Visit Salesforce’s landing page about this new offering for more information.

Per the website, the following is the high-level offering:

sfdc_platform_edition1.png
As of April 23, 2007. See the Salesforce website for up to date information.

For this offering, the Apex platform consists of:

sfdc_platform_edition2.png
As of April 23, 2007. See the Salesforce website for up to date information.

It sounds almost identical to what I suggested except that it doesn’t sound like adding/removing licenses is as self-service as I’d like. You still have to run through a sales organization to get it.

What isn’t clear is whether a company can simply purchase the Platform Edition without purchasing CRM first. The marketing materials on the website make it sound like you have to be a CRM customer first and then you can extend non-CRM functionality to others. Also, the names of the offerings are “Salesforce Platform Edition for Enterprise Edition” and “Salesforce Platform Edition for Unlimited Edition“. This definitely makes it sound like its not a stand-alone offering, which is too bad. It would have been an easy thing to do and it would open up their market a lot more. I imagine many companies would be interested in starting with non-CRM offerings and move to CRM later once they see how great the platform is.

It’s definitely a step in the right direction.

5 Comments

  1. Chris Said,

    April 23, 2007 @ 10:30 am

    You do not need to purchase CRM first. You can purchase platform licenses as a stand alone (but need at least 1 CRM license for administration).

  2. David Claiborne Said,

    April 23, 2007 @ 8:22 pm

    This is what was originally sold as the OEM edition, which was only $25 per user per month. I guess that was the cost without sales and marketing. salesforce.com never could get a straight story on what the OEM edition was, even though there were several companies who tried selling it. There also were lot of press releases.

    This link is about 11 months old, which coincided with the first AppExchange Day in San Francisco – http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C1967381%2C00.asp.

    At the bottom of the article is this sentence – “ISVs can work with the AppExchange OEM edition for $25 per user per month. The OEM edition provides the common user interface, security and data sharing models. It also gives developers access to the AppExchange API, Database, and the AppExchange Builder for customization and integration.”

    I guess Remend, and MyLoanBiz and others drank the Kool Aid a little too early.

    Many analysts, notably Heather Bellini with UBS, have been predicting this or calling for it for a couple of years, although Ms. Bellini (along with a lot of others) would like to see a $10 per user per month price (without sales and marketing).

  3. Salesforce Platform Edition at Ah Knight’s Blog Said,

    April 29, 2007 @ 5:54 am

    […] Just find out from this blog , that Salesforce release the platform edition , which is the basic or so call OEM edition , without all the CRM module. The first thing pop in my mind is Great ! base on this , everyone can just build the application base on their requirement without the CRM restriction. But the next thing is , without the CRM why i still want to use Salesforce ? there are quite a few web2.0 product out there which can do the same thing … […]

  4. David Claiborne Said,

    May 30, 2007 @ 1:13 pm

    Reason 1 is the existing sfdc infrastructure to store and secure your data.

    Reason 2 is the ability to quickly create features, data objects, relationships, etc. with the sfdc tools, with no code.

    Reason 3 is the ability to expand beyond the tools with the sfdc api.

    Is there an existing Web 2.0 product that provides all that now?

  5. Salesforce Platform Edition | I'm Knight Said,

    December 7, 2009 @ 8:24 am

    […] find out from this blog , that Salesforce release the platform edition , which is the basic or so call OEM edition , […]

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