Salesforce.com launches on-demand CRM platform

Salesforce.com has launched a software as a service (SaaS) platform that allows businesses to develop their own on-demand applications more easily.

The new Force.com platform was unveiled by Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff at the company's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week.

The SaaS platform includes new Visualforce technology, using HTML and Ajax, which allows businesses to create custom user-interfaces for their customer relationship management applications for any device that has web access.

Pricing for the Force.com platform ranges from $10 per user per month for the basic package up to $125 per user per month for enterprises.

Salesforce.com also unveiled its next batch of product updates scheduled for winter 2008, which includes a move into on-demand content management for managing documents and unstructured data.

Benioff defended the SaaS model against traditional software licensing, citing Gartner statistics claiming $8 out of every $10 of IT spend is "dead money" and saying on-demand applications free up the CIO to focus on more important issues.

He said: "The role of the CIO is changing, evolving. We believe the new role of the CIO is the chief innovation officer. Whether they own the infrastructure or not is no longer relevant in this age of the internet. I think the CIO today wants and needs to hear from us. They are under pressure to innovate."

David Bradshaw, analyst at Ovum, said big user organisations are unlikely to rush to embrace Salesforce.com's platform because of the investment in their existing architecture and infrastructure but said SaaS generally is making more inroads into the enterprise market.

He told silicon.com: "Some people don't realise they are already using SaaS, for example Experian's credit management tools. There is a camp positively hostile to SaaS because it is outside their control and there is a camp that is enthusiastic because it solves a problem for them."