November 13, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
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.
October 28, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
One of the more interesting solutions I saw at the September SAP TechEd was SAP Discovery System For Enterprise SOA.
SAP Discovery System is a preconfigured bundled development environment that allow users to create composite SOA applications in a sandbox environment using technologies such as Netweaver, master data management and business intelligence.
SAP partners Fujitsu and HP offer the Discovery System and the environment is composed of the following software and development components:
- SAP® ERP application
- Enterprise services
- SAP NetWeaver® technology platform
- Web Dynpro development environment
- SAP Solution Manager application management solution
- SAP GRC Access Control application
- SAP xApp™ Manufacturing Integration & Intelligence application
- SAP solutions for RFID
- SAP GRC Global Trade Services application
- MaxDB database
- SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio tool
- SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer tool
- Adobe Lifecycle Designer
- ABAP™ programming language workbench
The true value of the Discovery System seems to be in the demo business scenarios and exercises that are included in the system like:
- Customer Fact Sheet
- Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment
- Global Trade Services
- Permit Process Scenario
- Service-Enabled Procurement Scenario
- SAP RFID Solution
- Telco Dealer Returns Scenario
- RMA Processing Scenario
These scenarios and demos are bundled with a snapshot of SAP’s Enterprise Services Workspace and allow users to browse and test SAP’s enterprise services and scenario’s. In addition many industry specific SOA test cases are available including scenarios for Banking, Telecommunications, Aerospace and Public Sector.
Itai Sadan, Program Manager for the SAP SOA Discovery System answered a few questions for the OnDemand Beat about Discovery System.
OnDemand Beat - ”Is SAP Discovery System meant to be used in a production environment or is it more of a starting point for prototyping and development?”
Itai Sadan - “It is a sandbox that is intended for evaluation and prototyping only. It is not to be used as a production environment both because it would not be the recommendation of SAP to install all software components on a single server for production use and because the licensing doesn’t permit it.”
OnDemand Beat - “Can SAP NetWeaver and SOA Discovery System be used to integrate data from both SAP and NON SAP systems such as Oracle or Siebel? If so where is the repository of data kept?”
Itai Sadan - “The answer is yes and many companies integrate non-SAP components into the Discovery System. The data is kept in the MaxDB database.”
OnDemand Beat - ”What vertical industries has SAP seen the most adoption of SAP Discovery System?”
Itai Sadan - “We built the Discovery system to be used by all industries. Our business scenarios are mostly industry agnostic. For example, one demo is called SOA Procurement Scenario. It is a very simplified look at the world of procurement where a sales order is received and then due to low stock the company has to purchase the missing items from its suppliers in order to fulfill the demand. There is also a step where a purchasing agent requests authorization from his manager to create a purchase order. This is a very general business scenario the almost any company can relate to. Our main goal was to showcase the use of the SAP technologies and SOA architecture best practices.”
OnDemand Beat - “What components of SAP Discovery System are available on the SAP Developer Network?”
Itai Sadan - “The Discovery system as a whole is sold solely by our technology partners HP and Fujitsu. On SDN you can find the documentation that explains how to setup the server after you buy it, how to run the demo scenarios, exercises and how-to guides.”
OnDemand Beat - “Will SAP Discovery System be updated in the future with configurations for SAP Business ByDesign?”
Itai Sadan - “We are always interested in adding new components to the Discovery system as they become available. You can see it by looking at the new components that had been added in the Discovery System v3 compared to the previous version 2. The main driver for choosing which components will be added is the requests we gather from our customers. Business ByDesign is an option although currently we are more focused on the software that is being used in the large enterprises.”
OnDemand Beat - “What is the next step typically for companies that have mastered SAP Discovery System?”
Itai Sadan - “Our goal is that customers will have a good experience using the software on the Discovery System and then decide to go into production with that software or do a proof-of-concept.”
August 28, 2008
Written by Ameed Taylor
Requirements management has always been one of the facets of software development dominated by traditional packaged software solutions. Over the years, the solutions of choice have moved from commercial packaged solutions to open source solutions.
GatherSpace; headquartered in Santa Monica, was one of the first companies to move Software Requirements Management into an OnDemand Model. It offers a feature rich solution that has all the functionality that development teams are used to in packaged applications.
GatherSpace features include a software requirements hierarchy, iteration planning, use case functionality, built in Agile Software Development, bug tracking and very mature reporting options.
Pricing of the GatherSpace solution ranges from $15 per user per month with an annual contract to $25 per user per month with a 3 month contract. Gatherspace also offers an on-site deployment option that starts at $650 per user with a 10 user minimum. It will be a tough sell for some companies to commit to a 3, 6 or 12 month contract with an emerging company like GatherSpace and it would probably benefit them to initially offer month to month contracts like some of their competitors.
Gatherspace’s packaged software requirements competitors include IBM Rational Requisite Pro and FeaturePlan. OnDemand competitors Include Accompa, Rally Software and Artifact Software.
