Salesforce opens up to in-house coders

Exposing the Apex platform will speed development

Salesforce.com has made its big move against enterprise software heavyweights by opening up the Apex development platform behind its on-demand platform. The move will let customers build new programs and tweak existing features on a hosted platform, wrestling down one of the biggest outstanding obstacles to blue-chip approval of the software-as–a-service model.

Available from the first half of next year, the Apex language will be able to create multi-tenancy
applications with associated business logic and distribute them on the AppExchange marketplace.

Salesforce will work with partners on creating a complementary environment for testing, versioning and other relevant tasks, and will fund global incubators that help startups develop programs at low cost.

“Apex gives customers the same power as Salesforce internal developers to build their own applications,” said Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.

“People asked for C++ or .Net or Java for on-demand. This lets users write and run code on our servers. You can build your own buttons, stored procedures or triggers. If you want to change our software you can do it.”

The strategy was received with rapture by many watchers.

“Apex changes the rules,” said Mark Gorenberg, partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. “I think this is the most important announcement in the history of Salesforce.”

Some experts noted that Apex will remove a point of differentiation for SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.

Rebecca Wettemann of analyst firm Nucleus Research said, “It’s the only thing Salesforce hasn’t been able to do and that’s been a real point for companies like Siebel and Microsoft to shout about.”

Dell founder Michael Dell called Apex “a breakthrough, it sets a new standard for the industry”.

Users said access to Apex would speed up development. “If you’re an IT executive, doing things quickly is what it’s all about,” said Bernie Sims, project director at not-for-profit healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente. “The potential is really cool. You can build whatever you want to build so you’ve immediately removed a lot of cycles and money. That’s an enormous competitive advantage going forward. [Being able to develop and run] stored procedures alone is a grand slam.”

Symantec chief information officer David Thompson said, “It’s really speeding up innovation. It enables you to get out of the procurement cycle which is very time consuming and expand into doing something that isn’t covered elsewhere.”

Andy Weight, client services director of TotalJobs.com, said, “We’ll definitely use it. This
will appeal to any customers who want to customise Salesforce.”

One possible caveat is that liberating the Apex language together with the ongoing trickle of new
features could complicate usability. “One of the challenges is that Salesforce is so flexible and that’s a two-edged sword,” said Kaiser Permanente’s Sims. “The issue of governance is
critical.”

John Caine, director of technology strategy at wealth management firm The Phoenix Companies, said in-house development could disrupt end users but Apex would let programming move “away from Java and back into that beautiful user interface”.

Pricing is yet to be set but Salesforce said Apex could be offered free of charge.