JasperSoft, Central Desktop Join Salesforce.com's AppExchangeJasperSoft, Central Desktop Join Salesforce.com's AppExchange

JasperSoft, an open-source business-intelligence vendor; and Central Desktop, which provides a business collaboration service over the Web, have integrated their products with Salesforce.com and are offering them through the on-demand software company's AppExchange.

Jasper4Salesforce is the Web service version of JasperSoft's reporting and BI product. Central Desktop, on the other hand, has adapted its software-as-a-service platform to support Salesforce.com's customer service relationship management product.

The two vendors are the latest among more than 400 partners trying to sell services that extend Salesforce.com's Web platform. AppExchange is the directory that lists the available services. Functionality added through AppExchange does not require any additional implementation costs on the part of the subscriber, since all of the products have already been integrated with Salesforce.com. There is, however, an additional monthly subscription fee charged by the third-party vendor.

In a joint statement issued Tuesday with JasperSoft, Heald College, a career school in the western United States with an $80 million annual operating budget, said it was using Jasper4Salesforce for data analysis and reporting of their recruitment pipeline. "Jasper4Salesforce enabled us to create a complex report that previously we could only make by combining several Salesforce reports that we ran, downloaded, and then modified in Excel," Eric Rajasalu, senior vice president of business development at Heald, said.

Jasper4Salesforce starts at $20 per user per month with a minimum of five users.

Central Desktop uses Wiki technology in building a private, invitation-only extranet that subscribers can add to Salesforce.com to collaborate on post-sales projects with customers. Software companies have been the biggest users of Central Desktop's own SaaS product, which they use to collaborate with customers during installations.

Isaac Garcia, chief executive of Central Desktop, acknowledges that the integration between partners' products and Salesforce.com's is not as tight as he would like. Central Desktop, for example, has its own data store, and documents created in the extranet have to be manually moved to Salesforce.com. "It's still young," Garcia said of the Salesforce.com platform.

Garcia expects Salesforce.com to increase the level of integration in the next release of the software, which is scheduled for next week in San Francisco. Central Desktop pricing starts at $99 a month, which covers up to 25 extranets.

Founded in 1999, Salesforce.com delivers sales management software to more than 556,000 subscribers over the Web. Analysts expect the company to report $495.4 million in revenues for the fiscal year that ends Jan. 31, up from $309.9 million last year. The company's services are used mostly by small and midsize companies, and within departments of large corporations.