Year of rapid growth precedes Salesforce.com user show

By Stacy Cowley

September 9, 2005 12:00 PM ET

IDG News Service - Salesforce.com Inc. kicks off its third annual Dreamforce user conference on Monday, capping a year in which the company has solidified its position in the customer relationship management market and begun expanding its technology into a broader hosted applications infrastructure.

Three thousand attendees are expected at the San Francisco show, three times the number Salesforce.com drew for 2003's debut Dreamforce. Salesforce.com plans to preview its forthcoming winter 2006 release and highlight customer case studies, including examples of projects based on its Multiforce platform, an architecture Salesforce.com bills as an "on-demand operating system."

The company is also scheduled to release the final version of its Asynchronous Java and Extensible Markup Language tool kit, aimed at helping customers easily integrate Salesforce.com's sales software with outside applications like Google Maps that are built on open standards. Never one to miss a branding opportunity, Salesforce.com dubbed the technology "Smashforce," reflecting the popularity of the term mash-ups to describe Web-services-enabled combinations of consumer applications and services.

More than two dozen product launches are on deck from Salesforce.com's partners, most focused on add-on functionality to extend Salesforce.com's sales and customer service management features.

Intacct Corp. is tailoring its hosted enterprise resource planning applications to work seamlessly with Salesforce.com, including single sign-on and a shared look and feel. The company's ERP On Demand for Multiforce suite includes applications for order, invoice, expense and procurement management, which can be purchased individually for $20 per user per month, or together for $65 per user per month.

Esker Software is introducing a Web-based service enabling users to initiate messages directly within Salesforce.com to be sent via physical mail, fax, e-mail or Short Message Service.

DreamFactory Software Inc. will launch its DreamTeam collaboration application, which adds project, document and group communication management functionality to Salesforce.com. Convoq Inc.'s new SellASAP adds presence awareness to Salesforce.com, so users can check on online availability of their contacts and colleagues.

Sybase Inc.'s iAnywhere subsidiary is launching the next version of its mobile Sales Anywhere software, adding BlackBerry support and more advanced search capabilities. Sendia Corp. will also be hawking software for mobilizing Salesforce.com, including its WorkSpace development and deployment platform.

They'll be among an expected 100 vendors exhibiting in what Salesforce.com hails as "the largest-ever on-demand computing expo."

Salesforce.com and its evangelical leader, Marc Benioff, have always been vocal proponents of the idea that hosted software will fundamentally change the market dynamics of enterprise applications. The company has been a highly visible CRM vendor for several years, but in the past year, its momentum has

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