SFDC & Information On-Demand

Salesforce.com announces ContentExchange, a new addition to its portfolio of online business software. Taking a dive into the Web 2.0 concepts, such as user-generated ratings and tags, SFDC claims that it is unveiling a service that will make retrieving corporate data much more intuitive and efficient than the current system of files and folders. This is claimed as yet another step towards our vision of managing all information on demand. Traditional SFDC products enable quick share and access of “structured" data. Such applications are typically geared toward things like customer service and sales, because the databases contain customer contact information, sales leads and so forth.

With this new offering, SFDC promises ability to interconnect the so-called unstructured content –covering the likes of HTML, office documents, email messages etc. Tagging facilities are enabled, with a variety of labels, descriptions and ratings facilitating easy retrieval of information. Unstructured data today is about 6/7ths of corporate data an any good solution aimed at managing them has a ready market. An attractive announcement is Apex Content, which would provide the underlying technology for other software developers to create products based on unstructured data. The idea is to enable developers build software for the company's eBay-like applications marketplace can incorporate the new content-sharing capabilities. The thinking is that with Koral, on part of the workflow chain of office management is well covered and on extension with the addition of other online products, the entire workflow across the space can be managed well within form SFDC - a move with very good potential. Corporates cautious about using on-demand solutions may like to experiment with this ligher applications having less sensitive data/content. Without doubt, this is an interesting space that SFDC is trying to muscle into.

Labels: Emerging Technologies, Emerging Trends, Ondemand, SaaS, SFDC