salesforce.com

Cisco System's CEO John Chambers is ready to add more alliteration to his name. Try calling him the collaboration kid.

Chambers, a keynote speaker Monday at Salesforce.com's user conference, "Dreamforce Expo," demonstrated the use of telepresence technology to collaborate on landing a sale.

With the increasing popularity of broadband, Chambers noted it will change the way employees work, how they work and the work itself over the next decade. And he forecast that the next wave of productivity and innovation will be driven by Web 2.0 tools that will enable collaboration.

Chambers has a … Read more

Salesforce.com next week intends to detail an extension to its Web-based developer platform that it claims will put it on par with traditional offline development tools.

At the Dreamforce developer conference in San Francisco next week, company executives will introduce Force.com, the new name for a set of tools and hosted services for building hosted Web applications.

It will also introduce an addition to its hosted development platform called Visualforce, a service that allows a developer to create a customized application user interface. Conference attendees will get access to a developer preview of Visualforce.

Visualforce complements existing developer-oriented … Read more

Excuse me, Mr. President.

Those words will soon turn four heads at Salesforce.com, which announced its chief financial officer, Steve Cakebread will be promoted to president and chief strategy officer early next year.

Cakebread, who joined the company five years ago, will relinquish his CFO post during Salesforce's fiscal first quarter, which begins in February. He will join three other executives at Salesforce, who also hold a title as president.

As for the CFO post that Cakebread will be vacating, it will be filled by Graham Smith, who currently serves as Advent Software's CFO. Smith will join … Read more

Journalists tend to generate a lot of dog references by the public. Lapdog, bulldog, bloodhound, you get the picture...

But here's another description to throw into the mix: Pavlov's Dog.

The saliva content in the newsroom usually hits the high water mark when the Salesforce.com press kits arrive, historically bearing chocolate.

But today, a lot of saliva went to waste. The Salesforce press kits arrived, touting the company's Summer '07 release, but no chocolate. Instead, a small, white box of mints came with the delivery.

Do you think the mints address dog breath?

Competitors were quick to respond to Microsoft's latest plans for hosted CRM.

Microsoft's pricing was clearly aimed squarely at Salesforce.com, which was quick to dismiss Microsoft's entry into the market, noting that the company has been talking about its plans for sometime without actually releasing the product.

"I think that Microsoft has announced this service more often than Roger Federer has won Wimbledon," Bruce Francis, Salesforce VP of corporate strategy, said in a statement.

Another rival, SugarCRM, took issue with the notion that rivals don't offer the option of moving from a hosted … Read more

A friend and I were discussing the state of software adoption yesterday. Our kids were floating down a river toward us, and we had plenty of time to talk about our respective companies as the kids kept repeating the trip.

It struck both of us that the problem with enterprise software is that it tends to forget how people actually work. Things like CRM, ECM, etc., tend to require users to change their normal behavior to fit the application. As a result, they tend to not get used, or at least not unless someone threatens to withhold compensation.

In the Web 2.0 world, Tim O'Reilly has spent the last few years advocating "architectures of participation" (meaning, as Tim further clarifies, that "users pursuing their own 'selfish' interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct" of their participation). But in most enterprise software, users must spin extra cycles to provide group value, e.g., they spend all day in e-mail or on the phone but then have to go to a Web page to record their sales activities in a CRM system.

Surely we're missing something.… Read more

Salesforce.com and Google launched a Web site on Tuesday that is designed to allow the online customer relationship management software maker to act as a reseller for Google's AdWords.

For Salesforce.com, the alliance expands its efforts to tie its hosted CRM software with Google AdWords, following its acquisition last year of privately held Kieden, which had created an add-on to Salesforce's hosted services for purchasing and managing Google-driven ad campaigns. Salesforce.com will expand beyond allowing its customers to launch Google AdWords from a Salesforce.com application to one in which it will act as a … Read more

Salesforce.com has scheduled a news conference on Tuesday to announce a partnership with an unnamed Internet company, and TechCrunch is speculating that the partner will be Google.

"Most likely it will be tighter integration between the companies. One rumor says that Salesforce customers may get a discount on Adwords if they bid through Salesforce's software," TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote. He also makes the case for why Google should buy Salesforce.com, saying that Google's new Gears software, which allows Web-based software to be accessed offline, combined with Salesforce.com's customer relationship management software … Read more

Salesforce.com on Monday is expected to announce a way move data between different applications using its online development platform.

At the company's first developer conference, executives will introduce Salesforce SOA, an extension to its Apex programming language that allows developers to integrate different applications via Web services protocols. Salesforce will host and run the custom-written integration code.

People can already write mashups that run within a browser, such as an application that displays customer information from Salesforce's sales application on a Web mapping service.

Salesforce SOA, by contrast, does the integration between programs on the server, which … Read more