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Dominating Business Web 2.0
Salesforce.com has changed the way we think about application development in the era of Business Web 2.0. Generally available since late last year, AppExchange the on-demand application deployment platform, now hosts hundreds of thousand of users and is the home for dozens of vertically oriented utilities solving real-world business problems.
AppExchange is a sandbox where application developers (and power users) can extend the functionality of the core features of Salesforce.com. AppExchange applications can be deployed to the enterprise and are made available to users via the sophisticated salesforce.com provisioning subsystem. AppExchange applications can be purchased in an on-demand fashion from their authors and can be rapidly integrated within a preexisting Salesforce.com instance.
At the heart of AppExchange is the remarkably flexible Salesforce.com Party and Event model. A Party is a person or organization otherwise known as contacts and accounts. An Event is anything that happens at some point in time, optionally at some place and most probably is attended by one or more Parties. Parties can be related to one another; imagine an Account (Party1) with one or more Contacts (Parties 1 through N).
It is the Party and Event models that form the basis of the sales force automation (SFA) and marketing management (MM) subsystems contained within the Salesforce.com On- Demand CRM. The AppExchange developer is not limited to only this set of objects but can create an array of custom objects and attributes that extend the baseline functions of Salesforce.com. Data can be stored in the AppExchange cloud. Business processes can be implemented using the workflow, reporting and form management development tools. Developers can create custom applications that implement the key business processes of a particular vertical market.
Wrapped around the AppExchange infrastructure is a web service enabled API that supports the integration of AppExchange applications Salesforce.com applications too) with other enterprise applications.
So how is this related to the Web 2.0 services stack? In an earlier post I suggested that CRM, or the Party/Event model is at the heart of the connected, collaborative nature of Web 2.0. It’s all about connections and the nature of those connections.
Within the AppExchange platform I can build relationships between Organizations and People. I can store information about those relationships; each relationship has meaning. The relationship may be within the context of a customer connection via a sales opportunity or a targeted marketing campaign. Perhaps the relationship is just between people a la the social networking paradigm elicited in products like LinkedIn.
Because of the customization and integration capability within the AppExchange the developer can build mash-ups using other services within the Business Web 2 stack; meanwhile all party and event related data is stored in a flexible, accessible and secure persistent layer: the AppExchange object store.
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