Salesforce.com Upgrades On-Demand CRM 2Salesforce.com Upgrades On-Demand CRM 2

Salesforce.com on Tuesday released major upgrades of its online customer-relationship management software, and launched a new single-platform for customers to manage and access all of the company's hosted applications.

The company unveiled the 18th generation of its CRM applications, as well as upgrades of its customization and integration tools and the new "operating system," called Multiforce 1.0, at a San Francisco product launch called Summer '05.

Managing customer and sales data through software that's offered as a service is increasing in popularity, as companies look to simplify their information technology systems by placing the responsibility for maintenance on vendors, experts say. Salesforce.com has done well in leveraging this trend, which has pressured software makers like Oracle Corp. Siebel Systems Inc. and SAP AG to launch similar offerings.

A poll released in December by the Info-Tech Research Group found that more companies renting CRM software were either very satisfied or satisfied with the products than those organizations that licensed and deployed the software in-house.

In launching Multiforce, San Francisco-based Salesforce.com said the hosted environment gives companies a single platform to manage, deploy and access all applications by providing single data and security models, and one user interface. As a result, the software makes it easier for people in different departments or companies to share information for better collaboration, the application service provider said.

The company hopes customers will use Multiforce not just to access Salesforce.com applications, either pre-built or custom, but also applications from partners or third-party ASPs. The latter may be difficult, particularly if it involves competitors. Got Corporation Inc., a maker of marketing software, is the only company to announce support for the platform, so far.

Salesforce.com also released version 2.0 of its customization tool, called Customforce, which enables customers to modify existing applications, or create new ones for expense reporting, project and schedule management, or other functions. The upgrade includes more than 100 pre-built business processes, such as lead scoring, discounting and quota attainment.

Integrating Salesforce.com applications with in-house business software, such as financial systems, remains a challenge for large organizations, experts have said. The majority of the company's 15,500 customers fit into the category of small or medium-sized businesses.

Sforce 6.0 is the latest version of Salesforce.com's integration platform, which leverages web services standards, a technology that uses extensible-markup language, or XML, for connecting to business systems. Among the new feature is a data-management tool that the company claims can handle large data uploads and mass updates, deletes and exports.

Web services is key to the company's integration strategy, Adam Gross, Salesforce.com director of product marketing, said. As the emerging technology improves, so will the capabilities of Sforce.

"By definition, web services are designed to work on the Internet," Gross said. "The timing for us and our customers couldn't be better. The industry is moving to web services as an (integration) standard."

About a fifth of the people viewing Salesforce.com data do so through an application leveraging the company's web services application programming interface, rather than through a web browser, Gross said.

"It's beyond a question of can you do it for a lot of our customers to how you can best take advantage of (the web services API)," Gross said.

Within Salesforce.com's core applications for managing customer and sales data, the improvements include better handling of customer emails sent to service and support staff, improved automation for routing calls up the support chain and an editor for building self-service portals that match the look and feel of a company's corporate website.