More news from Salesforce.com Spring ‘07: AppSpace

Next up during the keynote is/was George Hu, Chief Marketing Officer, talking about the Spring ‘07 release. This is the 22nd release – perpetual beta indeed. Lots of customer participation too – everything from the logo to features in the new release – much of which is surfaced in IdeaExchange. Though I haven’t heard “web 2.0″ uttered yet, it feels like these guys are embracing it.

George gave a little demonstration – some features that jumped out:

• popup reminders (apparently customers want these!)
• Ajax (?) rollovers with additional information.
• Enhanced search (it’s what most folk do when they log in) – lots of sexy on-page Ajax refresh when sorting/finding data.
• Embedded mashups
• Locked records for approval workflows with audit trails etc. They can even approve via email etc. Which means Salesforce accepts inbound emails – lot more email-based services coming in the future because of this.
• Time-based workflows – for example “7 days before opportunity close data create a task to send an email and create an approval escalation”

There are undoubtedly lots more – but this keynote doesn’t seem to be focussing on any hardcore developer details. Indeed, they speak about S-Controls and the like as if they’re all very new and that the audience won’t know much about them. I presume they’re right…

George then announced something new – AppSpace (with all their fonts and typesetting it’s hard to know how to write these names in plain text). It all happened rather quickly – but if I understand it right it’s essentially myspace for the enterprise. Customer portals on steroids. So you will be able to create your own “space” for your customers – customized, branded customer portals – that leverage the full Salesforce.com platform.

Aside: So what is this? An focused enterprise mashup tool? That’s how I see it. This is interesting, and potentially disruptive too. We recently had the IBM’s of the world coming out with their products in this space. Salesforce.com is here too now – all hosted, all on-demand. I look forward to hearing more details about this – Google is coming up empty right now ;-)

A nice little phrase George used: “written with clicks, not code”

Technorati Tags: appspace, saas, salesforce

News from the Salesforce Spring ‘07 keynote

I’m here at the Salesforce Spring ‘07 keynote. Lindsey Armstrong kicked things off by speaking about the growing on-demand industry. Demand for on-demand is high, and growing. Interestingly EMEA is experiencing a slightly higher growth than the US (52%). Of course on-demand is a disruptive and Lindsey appears to be quite confident that Salesforce is going to ride the wave.

I spoke to a number of customers in the “on-demand expo/breakfast” hall before the keynote, and of course they were all pretty positive too. “Customers want innovation, not infrastructure” – and that’s certainly something I saw from many of the partners.

Next up was Parker Harris – Founder & EVP, Technology. 550 applications on appexchange, answering one of my questions. (It’s little over a year old) He also spoke about appstore, making it easier to purchase the applications on appexchange.

Salesforce.com are developing a nice little ecosystem: Customers provide input via IdeaExchange, Developers participate in ADN, Salesforce.com provides the platform (Apex), and a marketplace (AppExchange), Commerce facilities to sell and use items in the marketplace (AppStore) – all centered around “availability/performance” provided by Salesforce.com of course.

Parker said something like “Coming soon and you’ll see more as my developers write the code”. Something that strikes me about Salesforce.com is how they have really embraced the “perpetual beta” that Tim O’Reilly talks about as a characteristic of the whole web 2.0 movement.

The winter release happened only a few months ago, and now we’re on the spring one (as it snows outside). That’s pretty dynamic and exciting – and of course because it’s all hosted all of the customers here in the hall have already upgraded.

Technorati Tags: saas, salesforce