Salesforce.com continued developing as “the enterprise cloud computing company” Monday with announcements that it is extending its Force.com platform to Facebook and Amazon Web Services.
The announcements are part of a series of recent moves that include the unveiling this week of Force.com Sites, enabling businesses to utilize the Force.com platform and applications in the creation of public Web sites.
‘Social Meet CRM’
The alliance with Facebook, a popular social-networking site, includes a new suite of tools that Salesforce.com said will “marry next-generation business productivity applications to the interpersonal power of social networks.” By creating a development community that leverages Facebook’s 120 million users and Salesforce.com’s 100,000 developers, the arrangement is designed to make Facebook more “enterprise-friendly” and give Salesforce.com a leg up on business applications for social computing.
Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO, said “we are seeing social meet CRM and the enterprise for the first time.” Force.com for Facebook is free to developers and utilizes Facebook APIs to integrate social data with database, logic and work flow functionalities.
The end result, according to Salesforce.com, will let Facebook users do corporate work inside Facebook, such as managing sales data, organizing business events, automating marketing decisions, participating in recruiting efforts, and collaborating on projects. Facebook users could also share business-related activities with friends, such as a job opportunity or collaborating on an event or project.
An example given by Salesforce.com is an online tool called Get Stuff Done for Facebook, by a company named Apps-O-Rama. The company developed this “next-generation project management tool” to allow Facebook users to share files, create and assign to-do lists, manage projects, organize events or trips, and track what happened while they were offline, all within Facebook.
‘Integration and Interoperability’
Salesforce.com is also linking its cloud to Amazon’s by extending Force.com to Amazon Web Services. This enables its users to access the…