Salesforce.com Announces Apex, the World's First On-Demand Programming Language and Platform

SAN FRANCISCO - SALESFORCE.COM DREAMFORCE CONFERENCE - Oct. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com , the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced Apex, the breakthrough new multi-tenant programming language and platform, that will deliver the future of business applications. Apex will empower customers, partners and developers with the same language and platform that have allowed salesforce.com to build its industry-leading on-demand service. Apex code and applications will run on salesforce.com's service, freeing businesses for the first time from the burden of buying and deploying complex software infrastructure. With complete freedom to innovate, the ecosystem can create and run any application on demand with the security, reliability, upgradeability, and ease-of-use for which salesforce.com is best known. With Apex applications available through the AppExchange, customers will benefit from unprecedented choice and freedom across all types of business applications.

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"This is the most important announcement salesforce.com has ever made. With Apex, developers from our ISVs and customers will be able to write code that runs natively on our infrastructure, providing them with the same capability as our own salesforce.com developers," said Marc Benioff, salesforce.com chairman and CEO. "Apex will unleash a new level of innovation as we provide salesforce.com's on-demand infrastructure to developers worldwide as a service. No hardware, software, data centers, or infrastructure of any kind will be needed to build, distribute, and deliver on-demand applications: Apex and the AppExchange will make it all possible."

"With Apex, salesforce.com is changing the idea of what an on-demand application can be," said Michael Dell, chairman of Dell. "And at Dell, we're proud of the fact that the Apex platform is running on hundreds of Dell PowerEdge servers. I believe that salesforce.com has established a new standard that the industry will look to for innovation on demand."

"Apex will enable CIOs and IT departments to focus on innovation -- not infrastructure," said Bruce Richardson, Chief Research Officer, AMR. "Companies today are spending too much of their time and budget on servers and other infrastructure just to keep the lights on. Apex will make on-demand application development available to everyone, allowing businesses to outsource infrastructure and focus on driving business value with their IT investment."

Apex: Empowering the Future of On-Demand Applications

Apex will dramatically expand the universe of applications that can be created and run on demand. Apex will run completely on salesforce.com's service, eliminating the need for operating systems, databases, application and Web servers, data centers or other infrastructure requirements. Code created, run and stored with Apex will be 100 percent multi-tenant and encapsulated to protect customer implementations against faulty code, and automatically upgraded in conjunction with the salesforce.com service.

Customers will be able to use Apex to customize the core features and functionality of their Salesforce deployments for their unique business needs. Apex will give customers the power to reprogram any component of Salesforce, such as Campaigns, Cases or Opportunities, or build entirely new components completely from scratch.

Customers will be able to expand the success that they have found with Salesforce on-demand business applications far deeper into the enterprise with powerful applications never before possible on demand, including highly complex applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and inventory, highly transactional applications for those used in ecommerce, and highly intelligent applications such as those deployed for yield management and financial services. Customers will be able to create any custom application on demand, and do it faster, with less complexity and more power than previously possible.

"Salesforce.com's Apex platform illustrates a trend driving the software economy today, the move to more open and flexible systems that put control back in the hands of customers," said Chris Barbin, senior vice president of Business Operations and CIO, Borland Software. "This is a tenet that drives Borland's own solutions strategy and is becoming an increasing priority for customers. Apex is positioned to offer us an incredibly powerful foundation on which we can deliver enterprise-wide business applications that fit our own requirements, our own processes and our own constraints."

Apex Programming Language

Apex will be the world's first on-demand programming language. Customers and developers will be able to use the full power of Apex to do everything from creating custom components, customizing and modifying existing salesforce.com code, and creating triggers and stored procedures, all the way to building and executing complex business logic, run entirely on salesforce.com's multi-tenant service. Apex will be a Java-like development language that is secure, easy and fast, and will be immediately familiar to any Java programmer. Anything built using Apex can be made available as a Web service and is accessible via SOAP and XML standards.

Apex Platform

Apex will be a complete platform for development as a service. In addition to the Apex programming language, the Apex platform will provide capabilities for embedded mashups, analytics, mobility, workflow and approvals, and deliver intelligence with a new API. Additional new features of the Apex platform will include:

-- Data Relationships API: This feature will make it possible to access and manage complex data relationships -- such as a set of information about an account, all the products they have bought, and all of their contacts -- in a single request. This capability, analogous to database JOIN functionality, will enhance both the speed and simplicity of integrations, and will be unique to the Apex API. -- Real Time Messaging and Integration: This new feature will allow other applications, including a middleware system, message bus or software application, to be immediately notified of business events in Salesforce, such as the creation of a new customer or the closing of a sales opportunity. With this capability, business processes that span multiple systems can be executed seamlessly and without any latency or delay. -- AJAX Toolkit: The popular AJAX Toolkit for creating business mashups between Salesforce and other systems, like Google Maps or Skype's VoIP service, has been updated to support the new API capabilities, integrate with other AJAX frameworks and provide greater speed and responsiveness. Apex and the AppExchange Directory

All Apex components and applications will be able to be shared via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, enabling all the innovation that Apex unleashes to benefit the entire on-demand community.

Over 150,000 test drives and 14,000 customer installations have taken place of the more than 400 applications that are now available on the salesforce.com AppExchange, the world's first on-demand directory, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

Pricing and Availability

The Apex platform is currently scheduled for availability in conjunction with Salesforce Winter '07, and the Apex language is currently scheduled for availability in the first half of 2007. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand applications enables customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. Apex, salesforce.com's on-demand programming language and platform, will allow customers and partners to quickly and easily customize and integrate the Salesforce suite to meet their unique business needs, and to build powerful new on-demand applications, without any infrastructure investment. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.

As of July 31, 2006, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 24,800 customers and approximately 501,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis/Budget Rent A Car (Cendant Rental Car Group), Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com/, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

Salesforce.com is a registered trademark of, and Apex, AppExchange and Successforce are trademarks of, salesforce.com, Inc., San Francisco, California. Other names used may be trademarks of their respective owners.