Going Ape(x Connect)

Okay, it appears that pesky non-news producing four-day Thanksgiving holiday thing is over. The proof? Salesforce.com today announced the forthcoming release of a “Family of Multi-Tenant Integration Solutions” known as ApexConnect. Release date on this mammoth project was announced as Winter 2007.

Apex promises “revolutionizing” (there’s that word again) and “simplifying integration for CIOs and IT departments at customers of all sizes.” More specifically, ApexConnect seeks to provide a comprehensive set of services designed to address all major integration needs for CIOs and IT departments, providing for “everything from pre-integrated AppExchange applications to custom integration with the Apex API.”

The ApexConnect category will feature more than 25 partner solutions for integration between Salesforce and common back-office, legacy ERP and custom applications. Integration solutions are currently available from folks such as AboveAll, Business Objects, Bluewolf Group, Bridgewerx, Cast Iron, Composite Software, Data Backbone, Dynamic Ventures, forceAMP.com, ilink, Informatica, Integration Technologies Inc., InvisibleCRM (sweet name), Ipedo, Jitterbit, OpenAccess Software, OKERE, Pervasive, Tibco, Salescentrix, Scribe, Sesame Software, SGC Software, Synergex and TwoConnect.

ApexConnect includes the ConnectOut feature of the Apex on-demand platform, which employs reportedly the industry’s first on-demand outbound messaging API. The feature promises to allow other applications to be immediately notified of business events in Salesforce, the classic real-time function. The ConnectOut feature is currently scheduled to be available in conjunction with the release.

ApexConnect will also include the new ConnectOracle for integrating Salesforce with Oracle 11i, and a new ApexConnect category of integration partners on the AppExchange.

Using a nice simile, Salesforce.com chairman / CEO Marc Benioff said that “ApexConnect is a multi-tenant aspirin for the headache of application integration that today’s CIO’s have inherited from their predecessors.” (If a guy is talking aspirin on Monday, you know he had a good holiday. How else would you come up with that particular example? Good on him.)

Of course, this announcement gave Salesforce.com PR a prime opportunity to release some number. During salesforce.com’s third quarter, Apex API transactions surpassed CRM page views on its service for the first time ever. Reportedly, over half of 3.7 billion transactions (a number derived from the sum of page views and API calls through Salesforce and AppExchange applications) on Salesforce service were handled through the Apex API. Nice.

AppExchange, meanwhile, now boast 230 partners offering more than 430 applications. Built on the Apex on-demand platform, these partner applications are integrated with the salesforce.com suite of on-demand business applications. Company numbers show that 7,400 salesforce.com customers have deployed applications via AppExchange.

With ApexConnect, Salesforce.com is also offering native connectors for common applications. In addition to integration with Office, Outlook, Lotus Notes, and ConnectSAP for integrating Salesforce with SAP R3, the company is announcing ConnectOracle for Salesforce integration with Oracle 11i.

That’s right: ConnectOracle, a product that promises what you’d expect, the ability to “enable customers to seamlessly integrate Salesforce with their back-office Oracle 11i database to gain a completely integrated view of all relevant customer data in one place.”

ConnectOracle will be available upon request for a $12,000 annual fee for customers of Salesforce Enterprise Edition and Unlimited Edition.