Salesforce.com's next customer management release breaks it out of CRM mold
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 5/1/2005 6:00:00 AM
In its next quarterly release, Salesforce.com will give users—including nearly 14,000 customers and 227,00 paying subscribers—the means to build their own applications using the infrastructure and point-and-click interface of its Salesforce CRM application.
Called Multiforce, the new capability would let users "multitask" between multiple on-demand applications running in the same environment.
"Multiforce applies the benefits of on-demand to the rest of the enterprise," says Adam Gross, a director for Salesforce.com.
In essence, it allows companies with relatively straightforward, data-centric applications—such as technical support or asset management—to develop custom objects using a point-and-click development environment. The objects are then managed by the data and security models found in Salesforce.
This can be seen as a follow-up to Customforce, released last fall, which allows users similar customization capabilities within the core customer management application. Customforce recently won an innovation award from Boston-based AMR Research.
"Salesforce.com changed the game in the hosted CRM market with Customforce," says Lara Preslan, an AMR VP. "It has removed a key barrier in many hosted solutions by allowing customers to customize.... More than just adding fields... it allows entirely new tabs to be built."
By contrast, rival offerings—such as Siebel onDemand—are said to remain focused on core CRM, with vertical-industry functionality and the ability to customize the display of data from the existing application.
Multiforce will be part of the next quarterly release of Salesforce, scheduled for June 10.
