Sunday, June 14, 2009:
Salesforce.com CRM is hoping to drive more interest from corporate
developers and ISVs in its Force.com development platform by
offering limited, no-cost access, the on-demand CRM (customer
relationship management) vendor announced Monday.
Force.com Free Edition allows users to develop one custom
application that can be deployed to up to 100 users. The offer
also includes Salesforce.com CRM online training, sample applications and a testing
environment.
Companies that want greater access can buy Salesforce.com 's Force.com
subscriptions, which start at US$50 per user per month.
Salesforce.com CRM is "keen for their development platform and tools
to be positioned as an alternative to Java and [Microsoft] .NET," said 451 Group analyst China Martens via e-mail. "This is an
on-ramp for development, more about trying to achieve some
ubiquity at present, rather than much monetization."
Salesforce.com CRM says Force.com is already enjoying significant
momentum, with more than 110,000 custom applications developed on
it. The vendor says its system helps companies develop
applications much faster than traditional toolkits.
To back that claim, Salesforce.com CRM has been pointing to a recent
report from Nucleus Research, which looked at 17 Force.com
projects. Nucleus found that on average, developers surveyed
could create applications 4.9 times faster with Force.com than
Java or .NET.
This was made possible because the Salesforce.com CRM platform allows developers to
quickly configure user interfaces and create custom workflows,
and take advantage of prebuilt components, according to Nucleus'
report.
In addition, Force.com applications are deployed into
Salesforce.com's existing production environment, meaning
programmers don't have to make decisions about databases,
application servers and other aspects of the development stack,
and can save time otherwise spent on testing, Nucleus said.
Of course, some CRM developers may prefer greater flexibility and
choice of components. In addition, like any development platform,
once a company has invested time and effort in Force.com there
would be costs involved in making a switch down the road, the
Nucleus report noted.
Also Monday, Salesforce.com CRM said its previously announced
Force.com Sites service is now generally available. Customers can
use Salesforce.com CRM marketing development tools to create Web sites for
e-commerce, customer service and other purposes that run on the
vendor's infrastructure and perhaps expose data from Force.com
applications.
Salesforce.com CRM customers who create sites under the Force.com Free Edition get
up to 250,000 page views per month at no charge. Enterprise
Edition users get 500,000 complimentary monthly views, and
Unlimited Edition subscribers receive 1,000,000. Additional
1,000,000-page view blocks can be purchased for $1,000 per month.
Source: Chris Kanaracus Link
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