More on-demand app options spring up

Salesforce set to announce Spring 07 collection today

Momentum behind on-demand applications continues to grow, with hosted customer relationship management (CRM) pioneer Salesforce.com set to unveil its Spring '07 release today, while Microsoft showed off its forthcoming Dynamics Live CRM service.

A key upgrade in Spring '07 is a portal tool that lets Salesforce customers expose data to their own external users. "If you manage a cooking class, and you want to let people sign up for classes online and reveal recipes to customers, you can do that through Salesforce," said chief marketing officer Clarence So. "Whether it's AppExchange or custom objects, now everything can be exposed through the portal."

He added that the feature will not incur an additional charge "unless firms abuse it. If you want to give 50 customers log-ins, you can do that".

Salesforce has also enhanced its applications with time-based workflow and an email-approval feature.

On the platform side, Salesforce plans to demonstrate how its Apex programming language has been enhanced to allow firms to build hosted non-CRM applications, for example a time-off planning tool.

"We'll also be announcing that current customers Business Objects and Siemens have become partners, and are now shipping their own on-demand apps based on Salesforce," So added.

Also attempting to build momentum in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, Microsoft used its Convergence event last week to show off its Dynamics Live CRM service, due for US availability in the third quarter.

The release will be based on the same code as Microsoft's on-premises and partner-hosted CRM options, which chief executive Steve Ballmer said would enable firms to switch between delivery models as required.

However, Microsoft quietly killed off plans for a unified code base to underpin its whole Dynamics line. Instead, the business applications will continue as separate products but with similar user interfaces, interoperability mechanisms and shared underlying roles templates and business processes.

Meanwhile, enterprise software giant SAP has told the Financial Times that its on-demand A1S offering, aimed at small and mid-sized firms, would begin testing with selected customers in the second quarter, with general availability expected early in 2008.