Salesforce.com pushes collaboration

George Hu, executive vice president of marketing, applications and education at Salesforce.com, explained at the Dreamforce Europe event in London that collaboration with the community had transformed its technologies.

"Now we want every one of our customers to tap into the power of community collaboration," he said.

The initiative marks Salesforce.com's 26th generation release, which includes more than 50 new features for Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas.

Some of the new features include "small but effective" additions focused strongly on collaboration such as tagging, filtering, searching, subscriptions, recommendations, associations and tighter integration between various services.

Hu explained that "employees only use tools that are simple to access and easy to use" and that this principle had been the guiding force behind the majority of changes in this latest version of the platform.

Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive at Salesforce.com, elaborated on what he called platform-as-a-service, which takes the existing collaborative services used by online companies and expands them by maximising the power of cloud computing and services.

Highlighting the growing move to services hosted and accessed in the cloud, and the impact this has had on application development, Benioff claimed that there will never be another great application development platform created again.

"Those days are over," he said. "The world has changed."

Analyst firm Gartner reported that the software-as-a-service industry is expected grow at a compound annual rate of 22.1 percent through to 2011 for the aggregate enterprise application software markets, more than double that of total enterprise software.

"Business decision makers are realising that this is the era of software-as-a-service, and Salesforce.com gives them the ability to harness the power of cloud computing to better their enterprises," said Lindsey Armstrong, president of Salesforce.com EMEA.

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