The DocuSign Hallelujah Moment
November 14, 2008
I’ve worked in a corporation before, a nice, established, old, east coast corporation. One thing that experience taught me indirectly, is the power and the requirement of the almighty signature… in triplicate… on all ten of these forms… and then on these slips…
DocuSign has brought the power of it’s SaaS E-signature systems and hooked it up to the Salesforce awesometrain. Out of all the other news pieces I could have taken today, this is far and above the best thing yet, being able to get a client/supervisor/your mom’s signature for the field trip without standing up, sealing the deal by only reaching for the mouse?
Have a look at the release here, and DocuSign’s site here.
Salesforce Data Center going live in December
November 13, 2008
SINGAPORE DATA CENTRE COMES ONLINE
Peter J Cooper (Singapore) of www.alturnal.com reports:
The salesforce.com Singapore data centre is coming on line in Dec 08 or Jan 09 (might be a little late but not much) they are using a US owned facility based here in a good part of the island with excellent connectivity and some blue chip neighbours in the same centre.
The facility was requested by prospective clients form the financial services industry that require data to be held for their clients in a safe and independent jurisdiction.
Bringing the facility online has been much disussed by SFDC and requested by clients so bringing it online will deliver on a long outstanding commitment. Full and transparent integration with existing salesforce.com infrastructure is expected but there has been some local speculation there may have to be some compromises. There is has been no hard data to support this claim however.
It will be the first outside datacentre holding the full salesforce.com product offering outside the USA.
–
I have to admit I was a little late in picking up on this story, if anyone has a link to any additional posts about this please post to comments.
Exacttarget, right on the mark.
November 12, 2008
I spent all morning trying to come up with a good pun to hallmark Exacttarget’s latest epic release and all I got was that lame title.
Yesterday, I noticed a few comments on the release and today Marketwatch has a full press debrief, have a look at “Exacttarget 2.0″ ? I don’t know if that’s warranted but it reads like they’ve released a whole flush of new features!
The press release at Marketwatch.
Dramallama!
November 10, 2008
Juan Carlos Perez of ItWorldCanada has a great post about some words from Salesforces’ Marc Benioff and Google’s Dave Girrourard directed at those late-to-the-game entrants in the software as a service race.
Personally, I rather enjoy an individual who’s seemingly completely unwilling to “play nice” with the competition hoping for returns. I guess that’s the ultimate perk for being on top.
Check the article out here.
Salesforcetimes data base update
November 10, 2008
We udpated the site to the most recent version of WordPress today (yes, this was overdue!).
If you notice anything that’s not working, please hit the contact page and let us know!
Great Post: Day 2 Dreamforce
November 6, 2008
Mark Smith from Intelligententerprise.com was down at “The Conference” today and has written a thorough post about his experiences there, difficult to sum up, but he’s got a lot there to tempt those of us who are unfortunately missing out on the conference.
State-of-the-union type stuff, info on the Google-Salesforce partnership and it’s progress, competing with SAP and Oracle, a bit on Michael Dell’s speech… heck… it’s got it all…
See Mark’s post here.
Force.com Sites unveiled at Dreamforce
November 3, 2008
Dreamforce kicked off today and in true Benioff fashion, Salesforce.com’s CEO announced the company’s latest offering: Force.com sites. Follow this link to learn more or see the official press release below.
Salesforce.com Introduces Force.com Sites, Dramatically Expanding Force.com’s Role in Cloud Computing for the Enterprise
Bringing the power of Force.com to every Web application and Web site
Force.com Sites will enable customers to run their Web sites in salesforce.com’s cloud
Easily publish Force.com data and applications to any Web site – reaching new users and communities
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 3 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Salesforce.com
(NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today unveiled Force.com Sites, a new capability of the Force.com platform that will allow customers to run their Web sites in salesforce.com’s cloud. Force.com Sites will give customers the power to publish Force.com data and applications to any Web site, extending their reach to new users on intranets, external Web sites, and online communities. Like all salesforce.com services, Force.com Sites runs entirely in the cloud without the cost and complexity of traditional software. Force.com Sites is now available in developer preview at http://developer.force.com.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050216/SFW105LOGO)
“With Force.com Sites, customers can run their Web sites in our cloud,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Force.com Sites will enable a dramatic expansion of Force.com’s role in cloud computing for the enterprise. We expect our community to unleash entirely new kinds of applications and innovations that will truly drive our vision of ‘The End of Software.’”
“Running our business on Force.com has been night and day compared with our previous client/server infrastructure,” said Michael Wolverton, CEO, Cathedral Partners, a marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of privately held companies. “Our business revolves around our interactive Web application, a marketplace to connect buyers and sellers. With Force.com Sites we were able to get our marketplace up and running in a matter of weeks instead of the months it had taken with our previous architecture.”
“Force.com Sites changes the entire paradigm for building applications,” said Narinder Singh, Founder and Head of Technology and Marketing, Appirio. “Companies no longer have to consider separate architectures and approaches depending on where the users are. Running Web sites in salesforce.com’s cloud removes cost and complexity and allows companies to extend existing applications beyond their own four walls.”
Force.com Sites: Run Your Site on Salesforce.com’s Cloud
Force.com provides a comprehensive platform for building and running business applications in the cloud.
The Force.com platform provides the necessary building blocks to quickly build and run business applications including database, workflow, logic, integration, customization, and user interface capabilities. Force.com also enables data and applications to be easily extended to mobile devices. Force.com does this without requiring customers to manage and maintain additional client/server infrastructure.
Force.com Sites now extends those capabilities to allow companies to share business data and applications on Force.com to external users and Web sites. Force.com Sites reduces the cost and complexity of managing Web infrastructure, and enables companies to be more responsive and interactive with their users and communities.
Web sites and Web applications run using Force.com Sites gain all the benefits of the proven security, reliability and scalability of salesforce.com’s trusted global infrastructure. Publishing business data and applications to the Web using Force.com Sites requires only a few steps to get up and running:
— Build an application on Force.com, using its sharing models and security rules to define what data and information to make public
— Use Visualforce to build the Web site’s external, public facing pages
— Register a Force.com domain name
— Publish and run the site on salesforce.com’s global trusted infrastructure
Force.com Sites: Publish Any Data, Any Application to Any Web Site
Force.com Sites will unleash a new wave of business applications that extend beyond the walls of the enterprise. With Force.com Sites, salesforce.com customers can now take the more than 85,000 custom applications they have built on the Force.com platform and extend them to their external communities and users. Customers can use Force.com Sites to:
— Build and run new Web applications with Force.com Sites. Customers can build public facing Web sites, such as consumer reviews, hotel concierge services or event registration sites that are tightly integrated with an internal business application running on Force.com.
— Transform business applications into Web sites by sharing a view of an application on a public Web site. For example, Force.com Sites provides the capability to extend a recruiting application to power a public-facing job portal. Force.com Sites can be used to quickly and easily add, update and delete new job listings, directly from a recruiting application. Visitors to a Force.com Sites-powered job listing site can interact directly with information in a recruiting application that has been shared externally.
— Extend the Salesforce CRM applications through the creation of interactive Web-to-lead forms, enabling site visitors to signal interest in products and services via a Web site. Force.com Sites also enables the quick and easy creation of campaign landing pages integrated directly with Salesforce CRM.
Innovation in the Cloud from Force.com Sites Early Adopters
Through an early adopter program, several salesforce.com customers and partners were able to use Force.com Sites to build prototype applications on Force.com. Some of the participants in the early adopter program included:
— Astadia, one of salesforce.com’s largest global system integrators,
built an application that allows organizations to deploy a full-lifecycle recruiting application on their website in less than a day.
— Appirio, a leading partner of salesforce.com and Google Enterprise, created four sites:
– An online market place for Cathedral Partners to match private
businesses and investors or buyers.
– Jobs4MyFriends, a new Facebook application that extends a company’s
ability to use employee networks to reduce the cost and increase the
quality of their recruiting and hiring.
– A Web application for a global entertainment company that allows its
hosts to manage interactions with their most frequent visitors.
Hosts can control what events are offered, dynamically create
personalized messages and offers for visitors, and allow patrons to
request trips.
– A Web recruiting application for ThomasNet, a provider of vertical
listings for more than 2,000 industrial markets and companies.
— Bluewolf, a leading software-as-a-service consulting firm and salesforce.com partner, built a community networking web portal for the healthcare industry that enables customer reviews, mash up of dentist locations, information on what services they provide and more.
— Jobscience, a provider of Human Capital Management applications on the Force.com platform, built a “new employee” on-boarding system for Washington Regional Healthcare, a hospital client that hires hundreds of new employees each year.
— Model Metrics, a premier consulting partner of salesforce.com and application developer on the Force.com platform, created CardLasso, an application that enables users to capture images of business cards from a mobile device camera and transcribes the information into data files in multiple formats, including lead records in Salesforce CRM.
— Sofia Works, a leading provider of Force.com technology applications, built an on-demand Boat Marina reservations system for Marina VIP, a team of entrepreneurs with a vision to bring on-line booking to the boating world.
Pricing and Availability
Force.com Sites developer preview pricing is based on monthly page views:
Group Edition includes up to 50,000 monthly page views
Professional Edition includes up to 250,000 monthly page views
Enterprise Edition includes up to 500,000 monthly page views
Unlimited Edition includes up to 1,000,000 monthly page views
Additional monthly page views are available for order:
* $1,000/month for up to 1,000,000 additional monthly page views
(regardless of Edition)
* $3,000/month for up to 5,000,000 additional monthly page views
(regardless of Edition)
Force.com Sites is available today in developer preview. Please visit http://developer.force.com to register. It is currently scheduled to become generally available in calendar year 2009. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company’s portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that customers manage and share business information over the Internet. The company’s Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful on-demand applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com platform, available at http://www.force.com/, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com’s Force.com AppExchange marketplace available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.
As of July 31, 2008, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 47,700 customers including ABN AMRO, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, Sprint Nextel, and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “CRM”. For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Copyright (c) 2008 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce and the “no software” logo are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
SOURCE Salesforce.com
-0- 11/03/2008
/CONTACT: Gordon Evans of salesforce.com, +1-415-536-7608, gevans@salesforce.com/
/Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050216/SFW105LOGO
AP Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org
PRN Photo Desk photodesk@prnewswire.com/
/Web site: http://www.salesforce.com /
(CRM)
Sanfran Chronicle: Benioff speaks
November 3, 2008
Salesforce’s lord and master Marc Benioff was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle on the weekend. Benioff answers questions on Microsoft competition, Salesforces’ rough times, US telecom infrastructure, philanthropy and wall street; the works!
Read it here.
I am not even going to try and paraphrase the words of the golden king, so you go enjoy that yourself!
Appirio did something! Oooo!
October 30, 2008
Appirio’s been making some strong moves the last year my favourite among them is making itself obvious in the relatively small wading pool that is SaaS/Salesforce/PaaS news and blogging community.
Recently Appirio’s taken another step by partnering up with TimeTrade to offer it’s custom scheduling application on the App Exchange… now… from within the heart of your Salesforce account you can schedule… oh… what… it ties in to the social networking!? Facebook??
Man… if companies like Appirio and TimeTrade are left to run rampant eventually we’re just going to have to turn a computer on somewhere and watch it generate money.
Check out the full story at TMCNet.
Demand Generation: Critical
October 28, 2008
This is a great blog.
I tried formulating some sort of a news post around Jason Stewart’s latest post at his demandblog (or Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation blog) but failed miserably. Jason’s been at an event put on by the good people at Marketing Sherpa, and likely learned a fistful about current business trends in an economic environment of tightening belts and tugging of bootstraps. Check out Jason’s comfortably-written demand gen blog, it’s definitely worth a look!
Featured Sponsors
Subscriber Count
Latest Headlines
- Xactly Corporation Secures $12 Million in Funding
- Salesforce.com Stock over $100 USD
- Vancouver Sales Event with Gittomer and Port
- Salesforce.com launches Service Cloud 2
- Breaking News: Salesforce.com Introduces New Contact Manager Edition
- Back in Business!
- Sales is From Venus, Marketing is from Mars
- Salesforce Times: We’re Hiring!
- Russian Scientists & the B2B Sales Process
- Sales 2.0: Why the Recession is Making it Imperative To Change the Way We Sell
