Salesforce.com Inc. officially unveiled the 20th generation of its hosted customer relationship management software yesterday, also announced a connector integrating its CRM software-as-a-service with SAP AG's R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.

Excerpts from the Computerworld Article on the same:

The Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3 is set to be released July 30. It will be available on request as a free option for the Unlimited Edition of the vendor's CRM software and will cost Enterprise Edition customers $12,000 annually.

The connector will allow users to integrate their Salesforce.com CRM applications with SAP AG's R/3 ERP software so they can view combined customer data from both products in a single place. The connector will support the bidirectional synchronization of information between Salesforce.com and R/3.

A few years ago, integration was said to be the achilles' heel of on-demand software," said Kendall Collins, vice president of product marketing at Salesforce.com. "That has not been the case," as Salesforce.com partners have built connectors between the vendor's CRM offerings and third-party products.

Salesforce.com chose to offer a connector to SAP's older R/3 technology, not its more recent mySAP offerings, because the "overwhelming majority of our customers are using R/3 4.6C," Collins said.