Perspectives on Salesforce.com

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:

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

For this offering, the Apex platform consists of:

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.

As you probably heard, Salesforce announced the purchase Koral, a content management system, and unveiled a new product called the Salesforce Content Exchange.

You can read more about it on Salesforce’s site here and see a product demo here.

I was going to analyze it and do a write up on it, but I’ve been beaten to the punch. The Read/Write Web has a great post about it here.

I just went to the ADN site and noticed a complete redesign. It appears that Salesforce will be introducing the Apex Wiki. This looks to be the new home for all the toolkits and documentation on developing with Salesforce (native, composite, api, ajax, apex).

While writing this post, the ADN site design was flip-flopping between old and new. I imagine they will let us know exactly what the site is to be used for, who can edit, etc. etc. It appears that it will be open for anyone with a developer account to edit the pages. I was able to login with my developer account ID and get to an edit page.

The direct link to the wiki is https://wiki.apexdevnet.com.

Salesforce has announced a new website (ideas.salesforce.com) to allow you (anyone. no registration required) the ability “for customers to vote and comment on upcoming features in Winter ’07”.

Visit ideas.salesforce.com and get your vote in!

Salesforce.com announced the launch of the OEM Edition yesterday. The OEM Edition allows Salesforce partners to build applications on the Salesforce.com platform and offer their products to non-Salesforce.com users. The price per user for the OEM Edition is $25/month.

I think I am interpreting this correctly…

You, as an OEM provider, offer your product/service to both Salesforce.com customers and customers not yet on the Salesforce platform. The OEM Edition only applies to the customers not yet on the Salesforce platform. As an OEM vendor, you pay Salesforce.com $25/month/user for anyone that takes up a license. It is then up to you to pass through that cost to your customer. The end result is that the customer only has a relationship with you, the OEM vendor. You, in turn, have the relationship with Salesforce.com as the platform provider for your product/service. Correct? Please add your comments to help clear this up. It is not totally straight forward in the press release.

This is a step in the right direction, but is not as ideal (IMHO) as the Platform Edition licensing I recommended in April. I feel that another licensing model is still necessary that allows you, as a consumer or corporate purchaser, to buy licenses to the Salesforce.com platform only. And to buy them directly from Salesforce.com. This would be a relationship between you and Salesforce.com with no third party involved. You just pay your subscription fee to the platform. From there, you would have the ability to add to it through AppExchange or by building your own apps. This allows for much more flexibility in that you start with the platform and then select/build the apps you want. Like I said, the OEM model is a step in the right direction, but you need to want one of those OEM products before you can get on the platform. The Platform Edition idea is an option to opt-in to the platform first (like buying a computer with only the operating system and then choosing the software you want).