SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 21 -- Salesforce.com, the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced Salesforce SOA, taking service-oriented architectures on demand for the first time. Salesforce SOA will deliver SOA as a service, heralding the end of complex and expensive software-based SOA solutions for intelligent Web services integration. Salesforce SOA is a powerful new capability of the Apex programming language that will allow developers to focus on innovation, not infrastructure, while building a new class of on-demand applications. Salesforce SOA was unveiled and demonstrated at the Salesforce Developer Conference.

"The journey to SOA shouldn't be slowed by the baggage of legacy software," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "In 1999, salesforce.com enabled customer CRM success with our award-winning Salesforce applications delivered on-demand via the Internet. Salesforce SOA will radically accelerate the kinds of applications that are available on demand by continuing to remove the barriers of software infrastructure that have been imposed by SAP, Oracle and Microsoft."

"The new Salesforce SOA capabilities in Apex will streamline the development required to create new kinds of enterprise applications," said Glenn Wilson, co-founder and CEO of CRMFusion. "With Apex, we were able to prototype a new version of our on-demand application in less than three weeks. Our new Apex-built applications will further enhance the success we've achieved with salesforce.com and our more than 750 customers on the AppExchange to date."

"Many companies have invested considerable time and expense chasing the promise of software-based SOA," said David Linthicum, CEO of Linthicum Group LLC., a noted SOA author. "Salesforce SOA will marry SaaS and SOA to make possible new kinds of business processes and applications. Developers, IT departments and CIOs will be able to harness business logic spanning multiple applications to mashup and create thousands of new applications."

Salesforce SOA: Enabling SaaS and SOA

Software-based SOA has required deploying and maintaining costly software and infrastructure, spurring lengthy, high-risk implementations that generate mixed results. Salesforce SOA will enable SOA as a service, run on salesforce.com's on-demand platform, removing the cost and complexity associated with deploying and managing infrastructure.

Salesforce SOA will provide the ability to mashup salesforce.com's multi-tenant on-demand service with enterprise workflow and business processes to enable new kinds of enterprise applications on demand. As a new capability of the Apex programming language, Salesforce SOA will enable SOA-based business processes, such as enterprise applications, to be created, maintained and leveraged on demand. SOA business processes will become virtual and sharable, and benefit from the scalability and agility of the on-demand model. With Salesforce SOA, developers will be able to:

• Use Apex to build SOA applications that integrate to Web services from billing, inventory or order entry systems.

• Call out to internal Web services such as Oracle Financials and SAP Order Management, and external Web services such as FedEx, Hoovers and Yahoo!.

• Build rich applications on-demand for any business process.

The Salesforce Platform, Apex Programming Language and Salesforce SOA

The multi-tenant Salesforce Platform encompasses a complete feature set for building business applications such as models and objects to manage data, a workflow engine for managing collaboration between users, a user interface model to handle forms and other interactions, the Salesforce API for programmatic access, mash-ups, and integration with other applications and data, and the Apex programming language.

Developers can use the Apex programming language to do everything from creating custom components, customizing and modifying existing salesforce.com code and creating triggers, all the way to building and executing complex business logic, run entirely on salesforce.com's multi-tenant service. Apex is a Java-like development language that is secure, easy and fast, and will be familiar to any Java programmer. Anything built using Apex can be made available as a Web service and is accessible via SOAP and XML standards. Features and capabilities of the Apex programming language include:

• Apex event model -- Apex can be tied to the execution of the platform, enabling developers to exert fine-grained control over an application. Developers can use Apex to customize the core features and functionality of their Salesforce deployments for their unique business needs. Apex also delivers the power to reprogram any component of Salesforce, such as Campaigns, Cases or Opportunities, or build entirely new components completely from scratch.

• Transaction control -- Because Apex is closely bound to Salesforce data, developers can readily add transactional features to their applications. For example, if one user is referencing a field while another is trying to delete it, the system is aware of the conflict. Apex also features data commits and rollbacks, which are especially important when working across multiple objects.

• Packaging, re-use and Web services. Apex uses a packaging model similar to that of Java, in which reusable packages of code can be invoked from each other or from within triggers. Significantly, any method defined in a package can optionally be automatically exposed as a Web service, and thus can be invoked via the Web services API or directly through the AJAX toolkit.

• Performance, scalability and upgrades. Because Apex runs on demand, developers enjoy the benefits of the scalability, reliability and availability of salesforce.com's industry-leading service. Applications potentially run faster because a single query can obtain information from multiple objects. When newer versions of Salesforce and the Apex itself are introduced, code is never rendered obsolete. Salesforce.com ensures backward compatibility so that code continues to operate without modification.

• Apex and the AppExchange.  Apex can be packaged alongside custom objects, S- controls and other platform features, allowing developers to redistribute their Apex-built apps via the AppExchange directory.

For more information on the Apex programming language and Salesforce SOA, visit http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Salesforce_SOA.

Salesforce Developer Network: Tools and Resources to Develop On Demand

To spur development with Apex, salesforce.com also is providing comprehensive developer resources at its Wiki-based developer site, http://developer.salesforce.com/. The Salesforce Developer Network provides the community, tools and resources to let developers use the Apex programming language to build new applications for the AppExchange. Now any developer in the world -- with access to just a Web browser and Internet connection -- can harness the power of the world's most popular multi-tenant platform to create new applications and mashups from scratch. With toolkits and resources for most popular development languages and environments, including AJAX, Eclipse, Flex, Java, .NET and PHP, developers can also combine those applications with other Web services to create new business mashups, allowing developers, ISVs and IT organizations to easily leverage The Business Web in their projects and offerings.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. The Salesforce Platform, the world's first on-demand platform, enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that extend beyond CRM to deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy and The Business Web across the enterprise. The Salesforce Platform allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, available at www.salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings. For more information, visit www.salesforce.com/.

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Source: Salesforce.com Inc.