Spacin’ with Salesforce.com

Yesterday saw the release of Salesforce.com’s Spring ‘07 release, the 22nd generation of its on-demand business services, but the buzz in the last 24 hours has been all about the heretofore unreleased product known as AppSpace. Representative headlines from those in the industry media include “Salesforce.com Aims to Do for Portals What MySpace Did for Networking,” “My Space for the CRM Crowd” and “What Salesforce.com Is Wearing This Spring.”

AppSpace is essentially Salesforce’s take on MySpace (“Just as MySpace brought together individuals on the consumer web,” said ever-quotable Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff upon opening Spring ‘07, “AppSpace will bring together companies and their customers on the business web.) The Salesforce version is designed to enable “companies to engage with customers using Salesforce and AppExchange applications inside a secure, branded online environment.”

Benioff went on to do the visionary thing again, with “We are excited to bring the End of Software to portals and blaze a new way for enterprises to engage richly and securely with their customers.” (And, yes, in the official print version of this quote, the capital letters are there.)

AppSpace is currently scheduled for a limited release as part of Spring ‘07 in April. Prices start at $995 per organization per month. General availability is scheduled for the third quarter of fiscal year 2008.

In other Salesforce.com news, the folks down there in that bizarre-yet-common amalgamation region known as “Europe, Middle East and Africa” were proud to announce Salesforce.com EMEA’s status as the no. 1 market share in “the world’s fastest-growing on-demand CRM market.” Statistics came courtesy of industry analysts at Ovum.

Salesforce PR quoted Gartner statistics showing that EMEA will surpass worldwide growth rates for on-demand in 2007, a market to be worth $19.3 billion by the end of 2011. Salesforce.com EMEA is showed a growth rate of 72 percent year over year revenue growth and 77 percent fourth-quarter revenue growth over 2005.

Recent sales wins for Salesforce.com EMEA include Allianz Cornhill Commercial, ALD Automotive, Astratech, Deutsche Bank, KONE, and Salesforce.com’s 5,000th EMEA customer … drumroll please … Rolls-Royce Motor Cars!