Salesforce.com is celebrating the 20th update of its online service by posting an offering designed to forge links to businesses with SAP installations. Meanwhile, rival CRM vendors have announced acquisitions and updates to boost their own offerings.

Salesforce’s raid on SAP customers comes with the launch of the Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3. The toolkit is intended to let customers integrate Salesforce tools with back-office applications to gain an overarching view of customer data, and synchronise account information between Salesforce and SAP.

The step is another in the upscale progress of Salesforce, which has ambitions to attract more custom from large organisations and shake off the perception that on-demand software is mostly attractive to smaller businesses.

“There’s a typical criticism that integrating enterprise apps with on-demand is a challenge, so we have packaged up transformations, information flows and tools,” said Tim Knight, AppExchange technical director at Salesforce. “This will get you the majority of the way down the road although there’s usually some work left to do.”

The Connector will be available free to customers on Salesforce’s top-end Unlimited Edition tariff. For Enterprise Edition second-level subscribers, there will be a $12,000 (£6,470) annual fee.

The Connector currently only supports SAP R/3 version 4.6 but connectors for other SAP and non-SAP environments are likely to follow. However, the move will take Salesforce into competition with its partners, many of which sell connectors on Salesforce’s AppExchange online marketplace for complementary programs.

The Summer ’06 refresh also folds in the recently announced Partnerforce to connect indirect sales channels; and AppExchange Mobile, a service that allows customers to hook up to Salesforce and compatible apps via small devices.

New features of the service include call-scripting guides, lead-history tracking for compliance reporting, and better control over customer service entitlements.

Summer ’06 is now available to all of Salesforce’s 22,700 customers and 444,000 subscribers. The firm said that AppExchange now has 280 programs listed.

In other Salesforce news, former European chief John Appleby is due to unveil an as-yet unnamed on-demand CRM startup this week.

The on-demand CRM field is still growing fast and changing fast, most notably through acquisitions. Last week, CRM and billing giant Amdocs agreed to purchase Cramer Systems Group for about $375m. Cramer develops telecoms carrier operations support systems and Amdocs plans to link what it sees as the firms’ complementary capabilities to automate ordering and delivery of services to customers.

CDC Software’s subsidiary Pivotal last week released its CRM 5.9 suite with extended support for mobile devices. But CDC is now unlikely to add Onyx to its portfolio, because Onyx last week reaffirmed its intention to merge with holding group M2M.

Elsewhere, InvisibleCRM, a startup firm that develops software linking Salesforce with Microsoft environments, last week secured an extra $1.5m in funding.