Dreamforce: ISVs Get In On Salesforce's Mobile, Social Enterprise

Dreamforce 2011 vision of the social enterprise

Three ISVs -- Concur, Workday and Infor -- Thursday said they are building new social apps in the cloud using Salesforce's Force.com and will offer new apps in AppExchange, Salesforce's cloud computing business application marketplace, which now boasts more than 1,200 app installs per day. Meanwhile, orders to Salesforce's ISV channel is up 210 percent year-over-year, and the company has seen a 25 percent year-over-year jump in ISV partner growth.

"This is all getting the development happening. This is all getting the ISVs happening," Salesforce CEO and Chairman Marc Benioff said in his Thursday keynote.

First, Salesforce and Concur pulled the curtain off of Concurforce, an integration play that puts Concur travel and expense management capabilities directly into Salesforce and Chatter, enabling users to create and manage travel itineraries and expenses from the Salesforce interface.

"They can use Concur within the same experience," Tim FitzGerald, Concur Senior Vice President of Business Development, SMB Group, told CRN in an interview at Dreamforce. Concur added that user Concur data is still hosted by Concur in its data centers.

Salesforce also joined forces with cloud workforce data upstart Workday, a pairing through which Workday data feeds can be built on the Force.com cloud Platform-as-a-Service and will enable Workday data to be integrated into Chatter to let users share, collaborate and act on workforce data in real time.

Workday said its partners, customers and developers can now pull workforce data residing in their Workday app into Force.com to build custom apps. Through the Chatter-Workday integration, Workday users can use Chatter to share and take action on worker data that resides natively in Workday. The integration, which will be available late this year, pushes Workday business processes, such as approval requests, into Chatter's real-time social stream. It also opens the door for real-time enterprise-wide collaboration on topics that cross departmental barriers, like sales cycles, personnel, payroll, budgeting and spend on company initiatives.

Business application software player Infor also got in on the partnering action at Dreamforce, teaming with Salesforce to launch a trio of applications built on Force.com that the companies said "bring the power of the back office to the front office, and throughout the social enterprise." The three new Infor-Salesforce apps, dubbed InForce apps, have a strong focus on collaboration.

Through the partnership, Infor will build and deliver InForce Everywhere, a native Force.com application that brings ERP data into Salesforce; InForce Order Management, a quote, order and proposal management application; and InForce Marketing, which will leverage Infor CRM Epiphany recommendation engine, for global marketing automation technology. And Infor said more applications on Force.com are on the horizon.

InForce Everywhere offers a 360-view of invoice, contacts, quotes, shipments receivables, orders and return merchandise authorizations; a way for Salesforce users to view orders from Infor ERP applications; access to customer information and transactions from the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud using InForce Everywhere; connection to ION, Infor's standard integration platform; and Chatter integration to make data more social. InForce Everywhere also gives Infor's 800 channel partners the ability to resell bundled Salesforce CRM.

Meanwhile, InForce Order Management will offer a comprehensive quote, order and proposal management application built on Force.com and will integrate with Salesforce CRM to give Sales Cloud and Service cloud users a view of pricing and availability; and InForce Marketing will deliver a global marketing system built on Force.com and include inbound and outbound campaign management and lead maturation integrated with Infor CRM Epiphany.

"All that back-end content, we're going to render it in Salesforce.com," said Charles Philips, former Oracle president, now Infor CEO.