Granted, it’s only been one day since Salesforce.com announced Apex,
its new programming language and platform. Not enough time for anyone
to really digest what’s going on, right?

Wrong. The response to Apex from customers (and, not surprisingly,
partners) has really been overwhelmingly positive. I spent a good
amount of time Oct. 9 and Oct. 10, the first and second days of
Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference here in San Francisco,
talking to people—developers, sales executives, partners.

I wandered around the show floor, haunted the lunch area,
stopped people on the street. My main questions: What do you think of
Apex? Will you develop applications using a proprietary language from
Salesforce.com? And if so, will you develop beyond the confines of CRM
(customer relationship management), clearly Salesforce.com’s sweet
spot?

The surprising thing is that everyone I stopped had an opinion. The response, bar none: Salesforce is on to something with Apex.

"It’s great. It allows us the flexibility to be truly
customizable," said Thomas Grady, the director of world wide customer
service with Novariant, in Menlo Park, Calif.

Grady said his company would use Apex to extend Salesforce.com
CRM-based applications, to develop internal Web portals, push
information up to dealer networks and tie into partners.

The caveat for Grady, and for other customers that I spoke
with: Apex development will remain within the confines of the CRM
realm. At least for now.

But Salesforce has aspirations beyond CRM development—indeed
they’ve pitched Apex as a platform and language to develop any type of
on-demand application.

Some industry watchers have suggested that Salesforce is
looking for an entrée to ERP (enterprise resource planning) development
with Apex.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, was clear during an Oct. 9 press Q&A that that is not a goal.

"I think it’s hard enough to be focused on a couple of things
[CRM and a platform] and do them really well," said Benioff. "If you do
more, you try and do too much. We just want to do a couple of things
really, really well and partner to do the rest."

That said, there’s no question Apex is, in Salesforce’s way of
thinking, applicable for ERP development—or any other kind of on-demand
application development.

They want to be, as one analyst pointed out, the platform for on-demand development in the future.

It’s interesting that customers had no hesitation with the
concept of hosting their development environment on Salesforce.com’s
infrastructure, despite the well published downtime troubles Salesforce
ran into in 2005.

"With the tremendous development in application security over
the past couple of years I have no problem putting my credit card
information online," said Richard Gonzales, an executive with Pegasus
Solutions in Dallas. "And I have no problem having my data stored in
Salesforce."

John Caine, director of technology strategy at The Phoenix
Companies in Hartford, Conn., was a Salesforce customer during last
year’s spate of outages.

"They haven’t had any problems since the system instability
and really, out of sight out of mind," said Caine, "It may prove to be
shortsighted —certainly there is an element of risk [hosting
development with Salesforce] … With Apex we sort of have to accept that
risk of performance and reliability. But what you get is an increased
level of access to data and to logic."

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By Renee Boucher Ferguson

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