Summertime at Salesforce.com

It’s summertime and you know what that means: It means … Salesforce.com is releasing new CRM software? Well, yes. Salesforce.com representatives today announced the availability of Summer ‘06, the 20th (really) release of its on-demand customer relationship management software. Summer ‘06 promises additional connectivity options to third-party products and non-salesforce.com subscribers. Summer ‘06 adds the Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3, a product that seeks to provide integration between salesforce.com applications and its concomitant ERP software.

The new connector will, according to company PR, provide bi-directional synchronization of account information between Salesforce and SAP R/3. The adapter promises to allow access to front- and back-office data in salesforce applications and is built on the SAP Java Connector (JCo). The Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3 is available as a free option for “Unlimited Edition” and “Enterprise Edition” customers. A second touted bonus in salesforce.com Summer ‘06 is Partnerforce, which is designed to allow extension of CRM applications to individual enterprises’ customers via customizable portals. This will be available to “Enterprise Edition” and “Unlimited Edition” subscribers for US $1,500 per partner per year, and includes subscriptions for five partner employees. Salesforce.com marketing vice president Kendall Collins, doing his best to do his job, explained that the new releases are all about integration. “We are evolving from basic contact management to complex CRM.

On-demand CRM is becoming tightly integrated with web services companies that want to deploy from the Internet, so the ability to use web platforms is critical.” And speaking of salesforce.com, that firm also managed to land some big deals last week as well. Representatives from Kerry Americas, a food ingredient and flavor producer, announced their firm’s deployment of Salesforce SFA and Service & Support; Kerry also used AppExchange to successfully create and deploy an on-demand application which integrates sales processes, customer information and product development to replace their old system built via Visual Basic 6.0.

Pre-deployment, Kerry faced the usual growing pains, company brain trust finally coming to the conclusion that the extant CRM system would require substantial development resources to support ongoing growth. Kerry used the salesforce.com AppExchange and AJAX toolkit to replicate their old CRISPI system as an on-demand application and integrated with Salesforce SFA and Salesforce Service & Support. Building the new application and integrating it with the company’s ERP system was completed in approximately three weeks. More than 750 will be using the system. Salesforce.com was also able to report some positive results shown as well. Australia-based Altium Limited, an electronics design software developer, last week showed some info regarding their implementation of the salesforce.com AppExchange platform in replacing their existing business software, streamlining customer management processes and providing an underlying IT infrastructure for company growth.

In the serious overhaul, Altium developed and deployed new quoting, purchase order, project management, inventory management, campaign management and support management systems across its 270 employees globally in under four weeks. Again, AppExchange was touted as a vital element: Altium brainiacs used several of the the available AppExchange Directory applications as a base from which to develop customized solutions. Altium used a procurement application as a basis for a streamlined purchase ordering system with multiple approval levels, and also extended a project management system from AppExchange to meet the company’s complex software development project requirements. And some Altium numbers were impressive, indeed.

In total, Altium transferred approximately 120,000 active accounts, 190,000 contacts, 300,000 assets, and 200,000 contracts to the new system within four weeks by a team of five full-time developers and three others. Quite an honest month’s work there, mates! Founded in 1985, Sydney-headquartered Altium Limited is a developer of electronics design software for the Microsoft Windows environment. Altium has offices in China, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States, and a staff of 260 worldwide. Altium’s claim to fame came with their release of the world’s first Microsoft Windows-based printed circuit board design tool. Kerry Americas is a part of Tralee, Ireland-based Kerry Group. The Kerry Group is in the global food ingredients and flavors markets, and is a leading branded consumer foods processing and marketing organization in selected European Union markets.

The Group employs some 20,000 in its manufacturing, sales and technical centers across Europe, North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Kerry supplies over 10,000 food, food ingredients and flavor products in more than 140 countries, has manufacturing facilities in nineteen nations, and seats international sales offices in twenty other countries. Salesforce.com CRM reportedly now contains 43,000 customer-built custom objects and applications, employable by Salesforce subscribers in building new applications. AppExchange now boasts some 280 available applications available, up from the 70 it launched with in October 2005. Salesforce.com is currently the market and technology leader in on-demand business services.

Salesforce.com’s on-demand platform AppExchange allows the building of powerful new applications, customization and integration of the Salesforce suite. Salesforce.com today manages customer information for approximately 22,700 customers and approximately 444,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices, America Online, Cendant Rental Car Group, Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust.