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Salesforce Debuts VPM 4 Force.com

CategoryBusiness

DateMonday, February 08, 2010

AuthorS Kelly

Salesforce Debuts Visual Process Manager

Salesforce Claims New Platform Service Extends Force.com's "Five times Faster" Advantage Over .NET

Salesforce.com has added new capabilities to its Force.com platform to help companies rapidly automate business processes by offering point-and-click process design instead of low-level coding.

The Force.com Visual Process Manager, will enable organisations to build business process applications with greater flexibility and automate processes across all departments. VPM is based on technology acquired from Informavores, a company that Salesforce.com bought in 2009.

Force.com is now the first cloud computing platform that enables companies to design and deploy business processes inside their apps, without writing software.

The Force.com Visual Process Manager is claimed to allow Salesforce customers to visually design any complex business process using an intuitive design tool and instantly run it in the cloud.

Early adopters are impressed with the speed of the VPM. Barry Newman, vice president of IT, Saveology.com said: "The use of Force.com Visual Process Manager furthers Saveology.com's goal of consolidating our technology architecture and moving more of our business processes into the cloud, leveraging the Force.com platform. "We continue to see improvements in productivity and time to market for new offerings and processes."

Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies and founder of the SaaS Showplace said: "Building and managing business processes with on-premises software has been needlessly complex and costly, requiring too much custom code and expensive infrastructure,"

"Force.com Visual Process Manager offers an easy-to-use process design tool that organizations can use on a pay-as-you-go basis to more quickly and cost-effectively build and manage business processes via the cloud, said Kaplan."

With Companies in a wide variety of industries, such as telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing looking for faster, easier and less complicated ways to automate their important business processes that connect their customers, employees, and operations, Salesforce says VPM will Liberate corporate IT departments to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.

George Hu,salesforce.com executive vice president, marketing and alliances said: "By eliminating the cost and complexity of legacy on-premises platforms like .NET, Websphere, and Lotus Notes, Force.com's multitenant approach helps enterprises build apps five times faster and at half the cost."

"The new Force.com Visual Process Manager is another example of why Force.com has become the cloud computing platform of choice in the enterprise," Hu said.

Prior to the Force.com Visual Process Manager, companies had to buy expensive on-premises software, hardware and infrastructure to automate processes. Furthermore, they could not innovate on these processes once they were deployed because the complexity of the software made changes cost-prohibitive.

The Force.com Visual Process Manager combines the elegance of visual process design with the simplicity, low cost, and quick results of the Force.com cloud computing platform - empowering customers to continuously refine and enhance processes to improve operational efficiency or fulfill regulatory compliance.

Since it's part of the Force.com platform, businesses can create dynamic and sophisticated business processes within their current Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2 deployments or custom Force.com applications. Force.com Visual Process Manager helps companies automate specific business processes by guiding users through multiple steps and recommending the next course of action, all without any coding. Features of the Force.com Visual Process Manager include:

Process Designer - The Process Designer enables companies to easily design business processes via an intuitive user interface. It includes a library of process components such as presentation components like forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be added to a visual process design diagram through simple drag-and-drop actions.

Process Wizard Builder - The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to easily design wizards that walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process. Process Simulator - With Process Simulator, customers can optimise the process design by simulating complex processes before they are deployed. For the first time, companies can now test the process flow entirely in the cloud, identify bottlenecks and conflicts, and immediately revise by reviewing each phase of a process.

Real-time Process Engine - The real-time process engine runs all of a company's sophisticated processes and automatically scales to meet the needs of any size business. Based on the engine, complex processes can be carried out while enforcing business rules and adhering to best practices.

Salesforce.com Customers and partners have already built more than 135,000 custom applications on the Force.com platform, including, supply chain management, compliance tracking, brand management, accounts receivable, claims processing, time-off applications and more.

Other examples include:

Sales: Call scripting and sales methodology automation

Service: Customer issue resolution and product returns

Finance: Billing and collections

HR: Employee onboarding and performance management

Legal: Contract management and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance

Operations: Surveys and supplier management

Force.com Visual Process Manager is generally available to existing Enterprise and Unlimited Edition subscribers