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Tuesday, April 01, 2008 5:05 PM/EST
I asked Adam Bosnian from privileged access management maker Cyber-Ark what sessions he thought would be interesting at RSA. He's going to the application security sessions. In years past, he's seen these sessions focus on application coding security tools to look for buffer overflows or other coding errors that could create a security risk. I'll also be interested to see if, because of SOA, app makers will focus on making apps while leveraging security products such as Cyber-Ark's newly announced Enterprise Password Vault 4.5 to take care of access management. This isn't the first time I've heard a security company talk about wanting to see app makers give over access management to a specialized company instead of building access management from scratch. And the features in the latest version of Enterprise Password Vault include a verification process that checks the stored password with the credential used on the target system...
Friday, October 26, 2007 6:40 PM/EST
Salesforce.com (again) showed off Force.com, its platform-as-a-service application development platform, just one month after unveiling the offering. Everyone was brimming with pride and joy and talking of "developer happiness." Salesforce.com Vice President Adam Gross was joined by James Ward from Adobe and Natan Zaidenweber of StakeWare, an AppExchange incubator partner that uses the Force.com platform, on Friday, Oct. 25, for a chalk talk in San Francisco. Ward showed off a Flex-driven, offline pharma selling app that allows sales agents to call on doctors and log notes that can be uploaded to Salesforce.com later. Ward also showed an application that would enable a conference attendee to pick sessions and build a customized schedule. Zaidenweber related that he had dumped a two-year Java J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) development project designed to help companies track corporate responsibility policies and compliance after he saw a Force.com demo. Now in the Salesforce.com incubator...
Thursday, September 20, 2007 1:00 PM/EST
Hosted applications, including Salesforce.com, make sense if they get enough customers to buy in. The ability to "socialize" -- or spread out the costs of a top notch data center including security, availability and scalability among a large group -- makes business sense. But now I'm wondering if it would be a better idea to aggregate these hosted services so that enterprises could consolidate access to the growing variety of hosted apps and services. I started thinking about this after attending a Dreamforce session on integrating Google Adwords with Salesforce.com to process leads. Salesforce.com users can get a lot of specific information about leads that come from Google Adwords. Leads that come from Yahoo or Ask are logged as coming from those search engines and also what words resulted in the search, but that's about it. In other words, it makes a difference which hosted services you use if you...
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 1:12 PM/EST
Salesforce.com is still out to prove the point that hosted software applications make sense. One area where this is definitely the case is the area of offline use of the applications. Offline Edition 2.0 enables Salesforce users to manage their CRM data when working without Internet connectivity. It seems the next step is to integrate applications such as productivity tools, including word processing, e-mail, VOIP and Web meetings, directly into the newly relabeled Force platform. Documents, e-mails, telephone calls and Web meetings are the basis of customer interactions and the basic building blocks of a formal business relationship. The only ingredient missing is face-to-face meetings, but even those can be logged through a calendaring system. During several workshops that I attended at the Dreamforce "global gathering" I heard the phrase repeated, "If it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist." One of the biggest barriers that customers put forward for why...
Monday, September 17, 2007 5:27 PM/EST
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff on Sept. 17 unveiled Force.com, previewed Visual Force and unveiled Ideas. The packed convention hall was filled with Salesforce.com faithful who were politely enthusiastic when prodded to applaud. Force.com makes Benioff feel like he's working at a startup again while also striving to break $1 billion dollars a year and move Salesforce.com beyond a CRM (customer relationship management) company into one of the top 40 software companies in the world. While a company that has as its moniker the now famous "no software" slogan, this might seem to make little sense. But it does make sense if you take Salesforce.com for what it wants to become: the general infrastructure upon which applications are built, data is collected and processed and information is then spit back, without needing much beyond smartish terminals in the enterprise. Benioff wants organizations large and small to rent Salesforce.com's platform, customize it...
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