Salesforce.com Launches ‘Big iPod’ to Store Enterprise Apps

Salesforce.com has introduced its fourth suite — Unlimited Edition — to add to its product portfolio, which also includes Team Edition, Personal Edition and Enterprise Edition.

Unlimited Edition, as the name suggests, offers a far larger capacity to store custom applications that users create or download from the company’s AppExchange, George Hu, senior vice president of applications told CRM Buyer.

“Think of it as a much bigger iPod,” he said, continuing with the metaphor Salesforce.com earlier introduced comparing AppExchange to Apple’s iTunes music store.

A platform that extends Salesforce.com’s CRM suite to other business lines, AppExchange offers users Salesforce.com-friendly applications developed by such third-party vendors as Adobe, Business Objects and Skype. The latest version was rolled out in mid-January along with Salesforce.com’s Winter ’06 release.

Space Counts

As more companies begin to use AppExchange, they are bumping up against the storage limits of the earlier Salesforce.com suites. The Enterprise edition, for instance, has storage capacity for ten custom applications with 200 custom objects, Hu said. “Unlimited is more robust in platform capacity — it holds unlimited applications, 2,000 custom objects.”

Unlimited offers 120 MB of storage per user, which is a six-fold increase from Enterprise Edition. Salesforce.com has also increased the number of customized tabs, objects and fields available for use in this product.

The company has completely rewritten its code base and replaced its hardware to support AppExchange’s general introduction, it said.

4,400 and Counting

There have been some 4,400 installs from AppExchange, according to Hu, suggesting that the market demand for the Unlimited suite is at least that large. Already, a handful of customers have deployed the new suite, but the size of its potential user universe is far greater, Hu says.

“It would also include customers that have created custom applications on our platforms,” he notes. Some companies, for example, have developed new HR applications. Others have developed highly vertical applications such as a sample management process for ingredients in a manufacturing environment.

“Unlimited Edition was developed in response to our customers’ rapid expansion of their Salesforce deployments across the entire enterprise, through the adoption and deployment of applications from the AppExchange,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO. “This is a fulfillment of our vision of ‘the Business Web,’ enabling companies of any size to manage, organize and share all of their business information on demand.”

Unlimited Edition is now available for US$195 per user per month. Enterprise Edition, Salesforce Sandbox and premium support and administration are included in Unlimited Edition.