09/22/2003

Salesforce.com, a maker of “software-as-service,” and BEA Systems, the application infrastructure software company, say salesforce.com is joining the BEA Controls and Extensibility Program as a founding member and is developing an sforce-enhanced version of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1. Together, salesforce.com and BEA plan to deliver a co-branded bundled solution that, they say, “will give developers pre-integrated access to all the capabilities in BEA WebLogic Workshop and the sforce client/service application platform. BEA WebLogic Workshop for sforce will enable developers to integrate and distribute essential customer information throughout existing systems and enterprise infrastructure at a fraction of the time and expense usually incurred.”

The vendors note that, “With this offering, developers have access to the unique combination of BEA's application development, portal and integration technologies and sforce's powerful customer relationship management (CRM) infrastructure and Web service capabilities. Developers will receive free access to both fully featured development versions of BEA WebLogic Workshop and the salesforce.com Developer Edition at sforce.com, allowing the creation of composite applications without any upfront costs. Enterprises will pay only for deployment of their solutions, eliminating much of the risk associated with traditional packaged enterprise software extension.”

"We are pleased to join BEA in the Controls and Extensibility program, and to work with them to provide a complete client/service environment," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "By combining the benefits of software-as-service with the latest composite application tools, our 7,400 customers and 800 sforce developers can quickly be successful in their salesforce.com integration and extension projects."

"Building applications based on a service-oriented architecture is the foundation of Workshop's development model, and is the basis for our partnership with salesforce.com," said Adam Bosworth, Chief Architect and Senior Vice President of Advanced Development, BEA Systems. "WebLogic Workshop for sforce opens the door for thousands of companies to realize the benefits of this new approach to application development."

The vendors add that, “As the platform on which salesforce.com S3 is built, sforce allows enterprises and solution developers to customize, integrate and extend salesforce.com and create new on-demand business applications. Launched in June 2003 in conjunction with BEA, Borland, Microsoft, and Sun, sforce lets developers extend their salesforce.com implementations using the tools they know and love to rapidly build solutions with lower cost and complexity than software-only alternatives. Already over 50 solution providers, 100 enterprises and 800 developers are using sforce to extend salesforce.com and build new applications.