Salesforce.com moves into ERP with Infor and Workday

Salesforce.com moves into ERP with Infor and Workday. Numerous announcements at DreamForce highlighted SaleForce.com's significance as a distribution channel for ERP applications. In addition to Infor's InForce announcement, RootStock (a long time NetSuite partner) was talked about as a SalesForce.com partner, and Kenandy appeared as a new venture intending to build ERP for manufacturing applications on the Force.com platform. There is speculation that this is the start of a wave of financial/ERP applications delivered from the cloud which will start to provide real competition to established vendors such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. These vendors have been challenged to deliver their own cloud-based applications and could be seriously threatened by competitors offering enterprise class financial and manufacturing applications on large scale platforms such as Force.com and Amazon.

ConcurForce available through Force.com. Another DreamForce announcement involved Concur, Infor's main competitor in the Expense Management space. Concur announce ConcurForce, described as a next generation Travel and Expense Management application available on the Force.com platform. This will provide an easy to access Expense Management tool within Salesforce and allow users to collaborate on business trips using Salesforce Chatter. It is a significant announcement in that it widens the reach of Concur's application to a much larger pool of prospective users.