Ripples from “Most Important Announcement Salesforce.com Has Ever Made”

After a period of relative quiet of, what, two or three weeks, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has arisen again to enter industry media quotelines. Last week, he hit the media with “the most important announcement Salesforce.com has ever made,” and naturally the story wouldn’t possibly end there.

As The Chump reported Wednesday, 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.

Soon thereafter, Information Week’s online edition was covering the man himself when he appeared at the Salesforce.com Dreamforce ‘06 user conference last week. Reporting that he “seemed almost resigned” to the question, “When would the on-demand CRM application vendor expand by offering on-demand ERP apps, such as financial or supply chain management software, through either acquisitions or internal development?” Benioff nevertheless got quoted.

Benioff explained that such applications would not really be offered by Salesforce.com and that he “doesn’t want to expand into ERP.”

“Forget ERP,” writes Information Week’s Rick Whiting, “Benioff is thinking bigger. Salesforce’s announcement of its Apex programming language and related SaaS platform this week, combined with its AppExchange application sharing service, shows how Benioff has his sights on becoming the operating system of the on-demand and service-oriented architecture worlds.”

The piece, which concludes with calculation of the dimensions of Benioff’s ambition, can be read at InformationWeek.com.

Meanwhile, over at SearchCRM.com, rivals are just lining up to take shots at Salesforce.com, “denounc[ing] the San Francisco-based company’s new release as everything from a security risk to an admission that the company has ceded ERP and the back office.”

Just one quote, if the Chump may pilfer it. E-mailed NetSuite Inc. CEO Zach Nelson to the ‘site, “It took NetSuite eight years to build a complete, integrated transactional application to run a midsized business … Salesforce.com’s soft underbelly is that they can never add a transaction engine to their SFA data model, which ultimately relegates them to being the next-generation, on-demand Siebel to NetSuite’s on-demand SAP position.”

Sheryl Kingstone, director enterprise applications and mobility strategies with the Boston-based Yankee Group Research Inc., echoed Benioff’s earlier sentiments using the old saw “no one can be all things to all people” by saying that Salesforce.com is “not taking their eye off of CRM. That’s where their bread and butter is” and “No one company can provide everything.”

A SAP representative weighed in to SearchCRM as all, questioning the security risk the Apex code release is. Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies Inc., opined that “The Apex move is a move away from enterprise CRM and toward becoming a platform provider.”

On the whole thing, Benioff has stated prophetically, “Winter ‘07 will bring unlimited customization to Salesforce and The Business Web. This new level of freedom and flexibility is only possible through the power of mash-ups, open APIs, Web services and the Apex programming language and platform on which salesforce.com is built.”