Developer Preview of Force.Com Sites

Salesforce announced last week at its annual Dreamforce user and developer conference in San Francisco Force.com Sites. Force.com Sites is Salesforce’s entry into the burgeoning Cloud Computing arena. Force.com Sites are only available at the moment in a developer preview and are expected to be released to production in calendar year 2009.

Built on Salesforce.coms Visualforce.com platform, Force.com Sites were envisioned as a way for existing Salesforce.com customers to extend their presence and ROI by creating public facing websites and applications. Salesforce benefits due to the fact that these new applications will run on the Visualforce.com platform, thus further expanding Salesforce.com’s revenue stream outside of its core CRM product.

Some of the key Force.com Sites features include

• Public websites
• Public web applications
• Create public interfaces to existing applications
• Branded domain names
• Profile-driven access
• Syndication feeds
• Performance caching

A couple of Salesforce.com customers/partners who have created initial Force.com Sites applications include Starbucks and Cathedral Partners

Starbucks application is called My Starbucks Idea and is a social media application that Starbucks uses to gather product and service ideas from customers.

Cathedral Partners Force.com Sites application is a market place and portal that facilitates the buying and selling of private firms. Cathedral Partners plans to utilize the Force.com platform to integrate 800 third party service providers and applications that can help users manage sell and buy transactions.

Force.com Sites pricing will be based on subscription package pricing and will offer users as little as 50,000 monthly page views with a Salesforce Developer Edition subscription up to 1 million monthly page views with a Salesforce Unlimited Edition subscription. Pricing above the standard page view levels will start at $1,000 per month for an additional million page views up to 3,000 additional per month for 5 million additional page views.

Marketo Receives 8 Million In Series B Funding

Marketo; a San Mateo based provider of Business to Business marketing automation software, has received 8 million dollars in Series B funding from Storm Ventures and InterWest Partners. This follows an initial Seed funding round in 2007 from InterWest.

Marketo offers two On Demand marketing automation solutions, Marketo Lead Management and Marketo Lead Insight for Sales.

Marketo Lead management; currently in use with 50 customers, is a broad solution that covers the entire Lead management cycle from initial Lead generation to marketing ROI analytics. Areas that usually bedevil marketing teams include Lead nurturing and Lead scoring and Marketo Lead management offers deep functionality that address those areas. Also included within the solution is landing page optimization and creation, data cleansing and integration with CRM systems.

Currently in private beta, Lead Insight For Sales is designed to help sales and marketing teams focus on the best leads. It has functionality that helps sales teams identify when prospects are open to buying based on email click throughs, webpage visits and other behaviors. Although some of the functionality within Lead Insight is already incorporated into Salesforce.com or Seibel CRM, the advantage of a product like Lead Insight is in having all of the tools prebuilt within one solution.

In conjunction with the beta rollout of Lead Insight, Marketo has created a catchy manisfesto called the Revenue Revolution that aims to help sales and marketing work together harmoniously. If only getting sales and marketing to work together was this easy…..I would be a multi-millionaire by now.

Marketo Lead Management is priced from $1,500 per month for the entry level solution to $10,000 per month for the Enterprise level solution.