Salesforce.com has signalled a major change in strategy
with the announcement of application development tools that will
help users to hone and customise its on-demand customer
relationship management applications.
Salesforce.com applications are hosted centrally and accessed
via a browser. Users pay monthly or yearly contracts based on
usage. Although the software works when users are running
applications without modification, it has not been able to cope
with customisation.
At its Dreamforce user conference earlier this month, the
supplier said the Apex development tool, scheduled for beta
availability in the first quarter of 2007, would support custom
development.
In the past, application customisation had to be written in a
language such as Ajax and run on an external platform, connecting
to Salesforce.com through application programming interface calls.
Apex allows users to write custom code that is compiled and run
directly on the Salesforce.com hosted infrastructure.
Denis Pombriant, founder of analyst firm Beagle Research, said,
"Apex will provide the missing piece that on-demand needed to be
fully competitive with traditional application development."
Robert Bois, research director at AMR Research, said, "The real
magic in Apex is that users will still be able to take quarterly
upgrades of the CRM product, and all customisations will work in
the new version without any recoding.
The biggest question, according to Bois, is whether Salesforce
can continue to balance between building such additional software
services and remaining attentive to the core hosted CRM users
responsible for its success.
www.salesforce.com/landing/apex.jsp