Despite the Oracle/Siebel news that had the potential to swamp its recent Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco, Salesforce.com had enough up its sleeve to keep the attention of its 3,000 plus attendees with the introduction of AppExchange, an application exchange platform that combines the principles of the open source distribution model with the dot com trading exchange concept.

AppExchange is an on-demand application sharing service that provides a central repository for applications developed on the Salesforce.com platform. Described by CEO Marc Benioff as the iTunes music store of enterprise applications, as the iPod is to iTunes, so Salesforce.com is to AppExchange, Benioff said.

"This opens what we call the sixth level of on demand," he said.

CBR