Redkite

June 16, 2010 – New York, NY –Salesforce.com and Redkite, a New York-based cloud strategy and systems integration consultancy, were the guest presenters at yesterday’s New York City Cloud Computing Meetup. Salesforce and Redkite presented to representatives from more than 20 leading organizations in the cloud technology space who came to learn about the latest advances of the Force.com platform, and hear practical examples of how the technology is being applied by Salesforce.com clients and partners.

Tom DiVittorio, the Chief Technical Architect within Salesforce.com’s Professional Services team, presented a detailed walkthrough of the building blocks of the Force.com platform, along with many reasons of why Force.com is the fastest path to customer success, allowing developers to build applications upto 5 times faster at half the cost of traditional software development. Tom talked through real-world customer success stories, and also conducted a live demonstration building an application on the Force.com platform.

Joining Tom was Redkite’s co-founders, Brennan Burkhart and Kenny McColl. Redkite’s team of professionals have been working with Salesforce since 2004, when Brennan co-founded OKERE, which went onto become one of Salesforce.com’s leading partners prior to being acquired by Fujitsu Consulting in 2007. Brennan, Redkite’s Managing Principal, presented the evolution of Salesforce from a leading CRM application to a full-fledged development platform, and his experiences having overseen more than 30 client implementations with Fortune 100 companies during that timeframe.

Kenny McColl, Redkite’s Chief Architect, also previewed two of Redkite’s forthcoming products: its LinkedIn Connector for Salesforce, and its Capital Markets workbench. The LinkedIn Connector is a free utility expected to be released later this month on Salesforce’s AppExchange, which allows users of Salesforce to view profile data from LinkedIn directly in Salesforce for both in-network and out-of-network contacts. The Capital Markets workbench, a 100% native force.com application to be released soon, will provide Research Sales and Trading groups with an alternative to higher priced offerings, both on and off of the Salesforce.com platform. Kenny believes “the platform now provides a great opportunity to offer highly specialized vertical solutions without compromising the user experience.”

By pairing quick-start tools such as the Capital Markets workbench with Redkite’s delivery approach which has been proven for the past six years on many of world’s largest and most complex Salesforce implementations, Redkite offers SMBs the same creativity in design, delivery experience and quality of execution as Fortune 100. Speaking about Redkite’s approach to delivering to clients both large and small, Brennan Burkhart said, “The Cloud levels the playing field with respect to Technology. Redkite aims to level the playing field with respect to delivery services.”

The New York Cloud Computing Meetup is a 500 member strong group of developers, entrepreneurs, and technology executives founded in 2008 to discuss the latest trends in cloud computing. The group meets monthly at the offices of Gemini Systems in downtown New York. Previous presenters have included: Amazon, Tibco, IBM, and Cloudera.

About Redkite:

Redkite was founded in 2009 by delivery professionals who have pioneered the delivery of Cloud solutions to enterprise clients since 2004. Our professionals have led many of the largest and most advanced implementations of Salesforce CRM in the world. We have led the deployment of Salesforce CRM solutions to more than 40,000 users globally, on more than 40 implementations for Fortune 100 companies. We are proud to bring this same excellence in design and delivery to clients of all sizes. To learn more, visit us at www.redkitetechnologies.com.

About Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. Based on salesforce.com’s real-time, multitenant architecture, the company’s platform and CRM applications (http://www.salesforce.com/crm) have revolutionized the way companies collaborate and communicate with their customers, including:

• The Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and contact management
• The Service Cloud, for customer service and support solutions
• Chatter, for social collaboration
• The Force.com platform, for custom application development
• The AppExchange, the world’s leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing applications

On June 15th, we’ll be presenting with Tom DiVittorio from salesforce.com at the NYC Cloud Computing group meetup.

Force.com: Platform Overview & Enterprise Solution Trend
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
6:00pm
Gemini Systems LLC
61 Broadway
New York, NY

See the full details, join the group and rsvp at the NYC Cloud Computing Group page

Session Overview

Join us as we learn from Salesforce.com and Redkite, a leading Saleforce.com implementation partner, about the power of the Force.com platform and the latest trends in solution development for Salesforce.com’s enterprise clients.

Tom DiVittorio, Platform Evangelist from Salesforce.com will review the features and development capabilities of Force.com. The discussion will include a real-time demonstration of building an application on the platform.

Redkite’s founders will discuss their experiences delivering Salesforce.com solutions to enterprise clients since 2004 and their outlook on how the market is evolving with the product. They will also provide a demo of some of their products that have been developed on the platform to meet the needs of their clients.

Read more…

We think so, yes… enough to warrant the game changer cliché, depending on how the final details work themselves out.

A lot of interesting commentary has been already been written, but there are a few big questions still out there: not least pricing and AppExchange packaging. We’re excited by what this could mean for our clients as there have been many occasions in the past where this might have been the perfect solution. It will certainly be interesting to see if we see Java applications ported wholesale, or if we’re going to see a new generation of hybrid Force.com/Java apps (more likely, in our opinion).

Read more about VMforce here and here.

We know this is tricky for our clients in financial services (a third of the visitors to this site are on IE, and a third of those are on version 6), but this is going to make our lives so much easier. Thank you Salesforce – now how about adding support for Chrome!

So seems that Chatter was the big news at Dreamforce this year. While it looks quite impressive, we’re disappointed that they missed the opportunity to name it ForceFeed!

We had a great time out in San Francisco and if we spoke to you, drop us a line.