Benioff makes “most important announcement Salesforce.com has ever made”

Marc Benioff knows how to make attention-grabbing statements and today he laid down a stereotypical whopper: "This is the most important announcement Salesforce.com has ever made," said the CEO / chairman. Um, really, Marc?

The jist of the earth-shattering news is that Salesforce.com has opened its code to outside developers for the first time with the introduction of Apex, a multi-tenant programming language and platform.

Companies can leverage Apex to tailor or reprogram Salesforce.com deployments or build components within the application from scratch. Salesforce.com previously has offered developer tools and platforms with limited flexibility for companies that wanted to write applications for its third-party network.

Over at CRM Buyer, Yankee Group CRM analyst Sheryl Kingstone was happy to explain why this move could mean nearly as much as Benioff hypes it might. The introduction of Apex, said Kingstone, “could level the playing field for on-demand offerings and on-premise applications.” Since Apex now allows users major customization opportunities, reasons Kingstone, “It just about knocks out whatever competitive advantage the premise-based application offers.”

“With Apex,” said Benioff, “developers from our ISVs and customers will be able to write code that runs natively on our infrastructure, providing them with the same capability as our own Salesforce.com developers.”

Apex runs on architecture in Salesforce.com data centers using Dell’s 1×50 architecture. Apex will be a development language akin to Java. All Apex products can be made available as a web service and is accessible via SOAP (simple object access protocol) and XML standards, Salesforce.com material reads.

The Apex platform is scheduled for availability in conjunction with Salesforce Winter ’07.

For now, the announcement’s pretty big. The biggest ever.

At least until next week…