Salesforce.com launches summer 04 release

Salesforce.com unveiled today its summer 04 release which will include considerable enhancements to its Enterprise Edition.

If the savvy marketing department at Salesforce.com.com picked the slowest time of the year for news announcements to maximize media coverage there was no need; by all accounts this release represents an important milestone for Salesforce.com’s software as a service offering.

The Enterprise 2.0 Edition will give Salesforce.com the ability increase its support from hundreds of users to thousands of users via a design dubbed VLO (Very Large Organization) architecture, according to Adam Gross, director of product marketing at Salesforce.com.

“We are now focusing on the back-end, refining our database [VLO] architecture which gives us the ability to do multi-tenant for enormous data sets across very large organizations, across thousands of users,” said Gross.

However, according to Sheryl Kingstone, program manager of CRM at Yankee Group, the new structural architecture for large companies does not mean Salesforce.com will be able to compete across the board with the likes of Siebel.

“They still don’t have the robust functionality of a Siebel for product configuration, proposal generation, and e-commerce shopping cart functionality,” said Kingstone.

But if a customer is mainly focused around sales force automation and marketing and only cares about scalability and usability Salesforce.com will compete head-to-head with Siebel, added Kingstone.

Fitting under the VLO umbrella is a set of technologies that also increases Salesforce.com’s ability to scale.

The 2.0 Enterprise Edition includes a cache server that stores all of an organization’s user-level preferences and customizations. These customizations exist as metadata in the cache server and are rendered on demand for high performance.

Enterprise 2.0 will also support development environments from BEA, Borland, Microsoft, and open source.

According to Gross, one of Salesforce.com’s biggest challenges is to convince IT that their customizations will work with the latest upgrades.

 “We use the same metadata model that ensures any customization can be easily upgraded. It is guaranteed,” said Gross.

In addition, the 2.0 version will open up more APIs to give users access to new objects; for example, to define Web links, user permission, or access to the data mode.

Although Salesforce.com appears to have the goods necessary to compete with any CRM player at any level, there are still a few gating factors, according to Kingstone.

“If you have an investment in an existing system you may want to leverage that one vendor,” said Kingstone. However, the Yankee analyst also warned that many larger enterprises are dissatisfied with their current client/server applications and are looking to “rip and replace.”

Salesforce.com’s best feature is perhaps customer word-of-mouth, Kingstone added. “Salesforce.com customers are extremely vocal. Siebel customers will have to articulate the successes they are having.”

Enterprise Edition 2.0 is shipping now.