Salesforce.com started by taking CRM on to the cloud, back in 1999. They called it salesforceCRM back in the day. Unlinke SAP or Oracle, Salesforce does not have off the shelve solutions for every industry. It has only two Standard Applications. They call then Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Ofcourse they also have Jigsaw and chatter, but I don't really consider them applications.
For companies that would like to build their custom applications, they have the force.com platform. Here any developer / company is free to build their own application and run it on the force.com platform.
License fee for force.com platform is cheaper than the Sales cloud or Service Cloud.
Note: Both the Sales cloud and Service Cloud run on the force.com platform.
Apex Exchange is market place for Salesforce.com applications. It is like the itunes app store for iphone or ipad. Developers are free to build applications on the force.com platform and sell them on App Exchange.
When a company wants to build out an application, they would rather check the Salesforce.com AppExchange for any pre-built application that solves their problem.
AppExchange is also nice because one can quickly find adaptors that can be used to connect to other backend systems on clients location. For example, a company might have a salesforce implementation, would also like to pull their customer data from their backend database and do a validation before new record is created on their SalesCloud. Here in this scenario, one would need a small team of experts to write an adaptor that talks to a backend system. However, there are many companies that do offer these kind of quick fixes as adaptors on appExchange. They are quite pricey and free to try.
For companies that would like to build their custom applications, they have the force.com platform. Here any developer / company is free to build their own application and run it on the force.com platform.
License fee for force.com platform is cheaper than the Sales cloud or Service Cloud.
Note: Both the Sales cloud and Service Cloud run on the force.com platform.
Apex Exchange is market place for Salesforce.com applications. It is like the itunes app store for iphone or ipad. Developers are free to build applications on the force.com platform and sell them on App Exchange.
When a company wants to build out an application, they would rather check the Salesforce.com AppExchange for any pre-built application that solves their problem.
AppExchange is also nice because one can quickly find adaptors that can be used to connect to other backend systems on clients location. For example, a company might have a salesforce implementation, would also like to pull their customer data from their backend database and do a validation before new record is created on their SalesCloud. Here in this scenario, one would need a small team of experts to write an adaptor that talks to a backend system. However, there are many companies that do offer these kind of quick fixes as adaptors on appExchange. They are quite pricey and free to try.
