Salesforce.com yesterday unveiled its first concerted effort to focus the power of its AppExchange partner network and Apex programming platform at a specific vertical market opportunity. Salesforce.com’s new initiative targets the financial services sector, in general, and the wealth management segment, in particular.

The new on-demand services come at a time when THINKstrategies’ research indicates that companies of all sizes are not only becoming more receptive to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), but are increasingly looking for industry-specific solutions.

The new wealth management offering combines Salesforce.com’s core customer relationship management (CRM) and salesforce automation (SFA) software solutions with a set of third-party applications and business services focused on financial advisors who want to better serve their customers. It includes a set of standard features and functions upon which business partners and corporate customers can add their own components and capabilities.

The new wealth management service leverages … Read More »

Although any of the following news items could warrant an entire posting to delve into their individual implications, time only permits a quick assessment at this stage. Contact me if you’d like to discuss them in greater depth.

Salesforce.com’s Winter ’07 Extravaganza: Once again Salesforce.com (SFDC) has exceeded expectations. The company had promised to release its new Apex development toolkit at this time, but at its Winter ‘O7 event SFDC added a few more features and new initiatives to extend its leadership in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market.

The Apex now permits customers and developers to more easily and extensively customize the SFDC user interface and reconfigure the on-demand application templates. The new development toolkit also permits extended data model customization and workflow modifications.
AppExchange is being expanded to focus on vertical market applications. Building on its tremendous first-year success focused primarily on horizontal … Read More »

I’m pleased to add THINKstrategies to the burgeoning list of podcast producers.

Our focus initially will be on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketplace, but we hope our podcast series will expand to encompass the entire landscape of rapidly changing IT and business services.

Our goal is to educate and evangelize about the business benefits of today’s exciting new SaaS and other on-demand solutions, such as utility computing and managed services, as well as examine ways in which customers and solution providers are innovatively leveraging more traditional services to achieve their business objectives.

Our first podcast focuses on the challenges surrounding the metering and billing for SaaS solutions, especially in complex enterprise environments. In this podcast we talk with Conor Halpin, the founder and CEO of LeCayla Technologies, a Irish company which has developed unique methods to track software utilization and enable organizations to more … Read More »