Salesforce lets firms mix and match for analytics

Salesforce.com wants to broaden its on-demand platform with component software that lets buyers aggregate sophisticated capabilities from multiple vendors.

Due later this year, Salesforce’s Winter ’07 release will let users build business analytics dashboards from various best-of-breed component sources. The move advances the firm’s nine-month-old AppExchange marketplace that has already swollen to accommodate over 300 applications for users to try and buy online.

At a conference for UK users in London today [18 September], Salesforce demonstrated a console combining views of closed sales, opportunities, sales versus quotas, historical trending, pipelines, key accounts and open deals. It also announced Business Objects as the first partner for the capability with its Crystal Xcelsius.

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff described the approach as “mashboards”, a term conflating mash-ups of combined program components with dashboards.

In an exclusive interview with IT Week, Benioff suggested that the analytics effort will become a broader push. “We’re trying to componentise all aspects to innovate at a discreet level,” he said.

Benioff’s ambition is to have thousands of firms on AppExchange, making the Salesforce platform a functionally equivalent competitor to enterprise software giants.

“I’m going after SAP,” he said, pointing to deeper integration with telephony and enterprise applications and messaging environments through links to Cisco, SAP and IBM environments that are currently being developed.

Another promise is transparency and Benioff said he had challenged rivals such as RightNow Technologies and NetSuite to share uptime and availability details as Salesforce does with its Trust.Salesforce.com gauge.

Salesforce has also begun posting its roadmap for future releases and has created a site for users and partners to exchange views on current capabilities under development at Ideas.Salesforce.com.