Hosted CRM service provider Salesforce.com took another
step forward last week in its strategy to build an online ecosystem
of suppliers that offer software as a service.
At its annual Dream-force user conference, the company unveiled
Customforce.com, an application development toolkit for building
online services for the Sforce platform.
“If you want to build a solution to connect Salesforce.com to an
ISV’s application or to a custom application, you would use
Customforce.com,” said Peter Gassner, senior vice-president and
general manager at Sforce.
The company also introduced the On-Demand Marketplace, a
catalogue of hosted services from 60 approved suppliers.
All of the suppliers on the company’s approved list use the
Salesforce.com Sforce set of APIs for integration with their
solutions.
Although most industry analysts say Salesforce.com is a market
leader for hosted services, Andreas Bitterer, vice-president,
Technology Research Services at Meta Group, cautioned that
Salesforce.com still lacks the depth of CRM features available from
enterprise players such as Siebel Systems.
He said that whereas other suppliers are creating
industry-specific vertical CRM solutions, Salesforce.com is headed
in the opposite direction.
Ephraim Schwartz writes for Infoworld
