Salesforce.com, the world leader in delivering on-demand applications, today announced the immediate availability and deployment of sforce 2.0, the next generation of the salesforce.com on-demand application server, to customers worldwide. Open, secure and reliable, the sforce 2.0 on-demand application server is the world’s first platform for creating, hosting and executing client/service applications. Sforce 2.0 allows developers to customize, integrate and extend the salesforce.com user interface, business logic and data model to support their specific business requirements with unprecedented simplicity and success.
“The industry leading integration capabilities of sforce 2.0 and the Winter ‘04 release allowed us to integrate our application with salesforce.com in less than a week. We were able to quickly extend the value of salesforce.com, combining user interface and data objects with power and ease,” said Eric Hoffert, CEO of ShareMethods LLC. “This type of rapid application integration is unprecedented with traditional enterprise software. Based on this initial success, we plan to use popular developer tools to build on-demand services with sforce 2.0, lowering development costs and speeding time to market.”
The innovations in the sforce 2.0 on-demand application server represent a unique application of emerging development technologies, including XML, Web services and utility-based computing, rendered for the first time in a way that provides enterprises with immediate and clear benefits. With sforce 2.0, developers can now define custom objects specific to their needs, use new sforce controls to extend user interfaces in response to specific requirements, and take advantage of a new enterprise Web services API that makes it easier to use popular development environments such as BEA WebLogic, Borland JBuilder X or Microsoft Visual Studio.NET. The result is the ability to create CRM solutions that meet and exceed the sophistication available from traditional software-based solutions, at fraction of their complexity and cost.
The sforce 2.0 on-demand application server is automatically delivered to more than 8,400 customers and 120,000 subscribers via the salesforce.com Winter ‘04 release, making it the most widely deployed Web service in the enterprise application market. Introduced in June 2003, more than 50 solution providers, 300 enterprises and 1000 developers are already using sforce to extend salesforce.com and build new applications.
“The sforce 2.0 on-demand application sever provides additional competitive advantage for our customers by allowing quick and easy creation of customized solutions tailored to their business requirements,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Sforce 2.0 and on-demand application development and deployment make the promise of Web services real today. While our competitors are making speeches, we continue to deliver tangible solutions to make on-demand CRM customers successful.”
Included in the sforce 2.0 on-demand application server are innovative new capabilities that leverage the latest in Web services technology. New sforce 2.0 features include:
—Sforce controls that allow developers to use popular development environments to create and extend user interfaces with active custom content and new forms. Sforce controls are deployed to and managed by sforce, eliminating the need for additional servers.
—Custom objects, which can be customized to match specific business needs. For example, to capture product return information, a custom object can now be created in sforce specific to that business process. A Web services interface is automatically created for all custom objects, making them available for back office integration via the sforce 2.0 Web services API.
—The sforce 2.0 Web services API features the introduction of a new SOAP/WDSL-based API that makes an enterprise’s full data and business process model available within all modern development environments. In addition, a new partner API is available to ease the creation of solutions deployed across companies.
—The sforce Object Query Language introduced in sforce 2.0 simplifies the querying of objects through the API, via a familiar SQL-like syntax. This feature significantly simplifies coding and improves performance by supporting cursors and other concepts in a Web services compatible fashion.
—Workflow controls that can be developed to trigger business rules and automate processes, create escalation and routing rules, and automate responses for handling online inquiries from multiple sources.
