Salesforce.com Explains Its OpenSocial Strategy
Among the scrappy Web 2.0 startups taking part in Google’s recent OpenSocial announcement, Salesforce.com kind of stood out.
Salesforce.com already has a proprietary development language and platform, Apex, launched in January. It also hasAppExchange, an easy and successful way for third-party developers to create and sell applications that run on top of Salesforce.com.
And then there is Visualforce. It uses HTML, AJAX and Flex programming languages to give customers with an Internet connection the ability to create and share their custom apps throughout their organizations, while enabling mashups with Skype, Google Maps and Google AdSense.
CEO Marc Benioff has said many times that the point of AppExchange was to increase the usage — and usefulness of — the Salesforce.com platform. So InternetNews.comasked Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing for Salesforce.com, what place these run-anywhere widgets have in its developer ecosystem.
Q: How does OpenSocial fit in with your company’s strategy?
We see this work as following our pattern of more and more kinds of data being available on the Internet and taking advantage of more kinds of applications.
Look at mapping and geo data. Once, you would have go to a particular Web site to use this data, but it makes a lot of sense to be able to represent your Salesforce.com data, like contacts and opportunities, geographically. It’s almost a no-brainer. We see this as similar trend.
On Orkut or another network, my friends and the strength of our relationships may be defined as similar taste in music or movies. But maybe I’m working on a deal and want to see the same representation of people, but expressed as how useful they’ll be in helping me close this transaction.
It could be a function of how many communications have there been about this particular deal or which people inside the company have historically had the most interaction with people represented on this transaction.
With the common API and a common way of presenting that information, whether it lives in Salesforce.com or Orkut or another network, you get portability of those widgets. So, I can pick one off one site and stick it onto a another like Salesforce.com, and it will work. So you can take adv of all this innovation that’s happening around the Internet net and put it to business applications.
Q: I thought taking advantage of third-party innovation was the point of the AppExchange.
If a developer builds a great graphing widget and wants to make it available on Salesforce.com, you’ll use the OpenSocial API technology we created with Google, our implementation of it, and repackage that up as an AppExchange application. It will be installable with one click, just like everything else on AppExchange.
You will essentially have to put a new wrapper around it. They will need to create the directory listing for it and put a new box around it, but the application itself will work without modification.
You’re free to define within Salesforce.com whatever a friend means. In a business context, the idea of who a friend is can vary. We provide a mechanism through our Apex code programming language for you to define what a friend is. It could be, “had interaction in the last 30 days,” or “is participating now”; you can define it however you like.
Q: How does OpenSocial fit in with Apex, which is a proprietary development language?
We’ve implemented OpenSocial in Apex.
Q: Does that mean the widgets for Salesforce.com won’t run on other sites?
OpenSocial is like giving you the blueprints for a garage. You can build whatever car you want, but the car has to be able to fit into this garage. And every garage has to be standardized.
By creating an implementation, we’ve said, “Because it meets these standards we’ve agreed to, you should be able to take any OpenSocial widget and plug it into Salesforce.com. OpenSocial is the plug — the interface. It doesn’t give you the actual underpinnings you need to have.
The AppExchange is a way of redistributing anything built on our platform. Because OpenSocial runs on our platform, you can use AppExchange to redistribute widgets.
Q: Marc is always talking about Salesforce.com as the Business Web, as opposed to the consumer Web. It seems like the distinction is blurring.
The whole idea is that the business Web has borrowed aggressively from consumer ideas. We’ve always been very upfront about saying that it’s where we get a lot of our ideas from. I see this as another example. As the Internet matures, so does what businesses can do.