Dreamforce06Oct 9

Brooks Jordan 0 comments

Yesterday Dreamforce kicked-off. Dreamforce is Salesforce.com's annual conference. If you're reading this blog, you most likely know that Salesforce.com is delivering customer relationship management software to companies over the Web. And that they've done such a good job of it since they launched in 1999, that it's unquestionable at this point that they're playing the disruptor's role in the market.

But that's not all. Salesforce.com also looked into its own future and saw that the very nature of software development would be changing. The essence of this was that a small number of companies would offer application platforms upon which developers would offer their apps to a wide audience - a business market place, if you will, much like EBay does for consumers. The benefit to developers is that they could shed a lot of the marketing and sales efforts, and use those resources to create better software.

Because Salesforce.com had 20,000 customers for its Web-based CRM system to point toward such a platform, they felt it could be their "second killer app." And they launched it in January of this year as the AppExchange.

The reason this morning's keynote by Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO, might prove to be more than routine is because, word is, he will be announcing that the AppExchange is now capable of not only hosting applications, but that the business logic can be programmed directly into it. This would be pretty extradordinary because it would mean that Salesforce.com could compete directly with companies like Oracle. And Benioff has publicly said that's exactly what he plans to do.

We've put an RSS app on the AppExchange, which you can see in the sidebar to your left (or here's a link to it: http://tinyurl.com/jnyg4), so that Salesforce.com users can pull data to their desktop or a mobile device. This is a perfect example of how useful RSS can be in a business context. But, we're also very interested in the AppExchange because we think that RSS is going to play a much larger role in the next-generation Web, specifically the business Web, as explored in the Live Clipboard post below. The AppExchange, and software platforms like it, is definitely part of that future.