ASP Salesforce.com looking to take on ERP Goliaths

SAN FRANCISCO - No one can accuse Salesforce.com of timidity. The application service provider in three years has made a name for itself in the customer relationship management field by challenging the dominance of CRM market leader Siebel Systems. Now it's eyeing enterprise resource planning.

"Our five-year vision is to offer everything that SAP or Oracle or PeopleSoft offers, but as an online service," says CEO Marc Benioff.

The company's first foray into back-office application services is Salesforce.com E-Business Suite, which will offer limited ERP functions. Due out late this year, E-Business Suite will include order, invoice and contract management. Traditionally, Salesforce.com has focused its services on salesforce automation - its mainstay - as well as marketing and customer service.

"We're starting to move into the financials world a little bit," Benioff says. His game plan is to eventually have all the big departments in a company using Salesforce.com, he says.

Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition is being launched this week. The version adds customization and integration features to Salesforce.com's core CRM offering. The customization engine lets companies designate different user interfaces for corporate divisions. A global company may opt to vary the default languages or currencies displayed to user populations in different locales.

The ability to customize views is important to Putnam Lovell Securities, a Salesforce.com customer since October 2000 and pilot user of Enterprise Edition since October 2001. During the first year Putnam Lovell had Salesforce.com, different departments added all sorts of custom fields to the customer database, says Rodric O'Connor, CTO at the financial services company. That meant when a user viewed a customer's record, the screen was getting longer and more cluttered with fields.

With Enterprise Edition, O'Connor can segment views for each business unit while still maintaining one database. The benefits are twofold, he says. "One, it's easier to use, because people don't have to scroll up and down looking for data that's of interest to them. And two - and this is more important for us - it allows us to add custom fields that one department needs to see and another department is not allowed to see," he says.

Putnam Lovell also is taking advantage of the XML-based integration capabilities added with Enterprise Edition.

The firm uses Grand Central Communications' hosted service to link Salesforce.com with BlueMatrix, a software service for creating and managing the distribution of investment research materials.

Prior to Enterprise Edition, Grand Central moved data between Salesforce.com and BlueMatrix by taking screen captures from Salesforce.com and converting the information to XML for BlueMatrix. With XML APIs available in Enterprise Edition, the process is not only more efficient, but also enables a more comprehensive exchange of data, O'Connor says.

Another key element of the enterprise and e-business offerings is Offline Edition, a new module that lets users work with Salesforce.com applications even when not connected to the Internet. The features - available next quarter - use Microsoft's .Net architecture, including XML Stylesheet Language Transformations, a language used to convert XML documents into other formats. An XML data store on a laptop, for example, stores the information a user decides to make available offline. Synchronization is automatic the next time the user logs on to the Internet service.

Putnam Lovell will use Offline Edition, O'Connor says. "We have quite a large percentage of nomadic people, so having access to the information - the contacts and opportunities that they need - on their laptops when they're traveling will have a lot of value to them," he says.

Today, Saleforce.com offers a basic synchronization option that lets Putnam Lovell users import limited contact information into an application such as Microsoft Outlook for working offline, but it's only a partial, generic set of data, O'Connor says.

"It doesn't have opportunity information and doesn't have all the custom fields that we use as an enterprise," he says.

Salesforce.com services are priced per user, per month. Enterprise Edition - which will include Offline Edition - costs $125. The original Salesforce.com service, now called Professional Edition, costs $65, with offline capabilities available as an for $25 extra. E-Business Suite will cost $195, including offline capabilities.