Salesforce.com Unveils Enhancements To Enterprise CRM SoftwareSalesforce.com Unveils Enhancements To Enterprise CRM Software

Online software vendor Salesforce.com Inc. on Wednesday unveiled enhancements to its hosted customer-relationship-management application designed to make the product more appealing to large multinational businesses.

Among other things, the Enterprise 2.0 edition of the Salesforce application includes tools that afford greater customization, ensure greater compatibility with other business applications, and provide automatic translation into several languages.

Enterprise 2.0 is part of Salesforce's Summer 04 product upgrade, which also includes software enhancements for users of its Personal, Team, and Professional editions. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff unveiled the products at a meeting with financial analysts in New York. Salesforce typically upgrades its product line three times a year.

Many of the enhancements appear to be designed to increase Salesforce's presence in large companies. For instance, Enterprise 2.0 features updated support for application-development tools from major enterprise software vendors such as BEA Systems, IBM, and Microsoft. Benioff told analysts that Internet-based software can provide the robust functionality required by companies without sacrificing simplicity. "Why are we building enterprise software as if the Internet did not exist?" Benioff said, taking a jab at rivals whose software, for the most part, runs on in-house client-server technology.

Also Wednesday, officials at office-supply vendor Corporate Express Inc. said they had agreed to expand the company's implementation of Salesforce software users from 2,000 to 3,000 over the next year, making Corporate Express one of Salesforce's largest customers. At Wednesday's analyst meeting, Corporate Express VP Mark Newhall said the company was drawn to Salesforce's increasingly sophisticated management modules.

Salesforce now counts 10,700 companies in its customer base and supports 161,000 individual users within those companies. CFO Steve Cakebread said the company's user base is evenly split across small, midsize, and large businesses.