Bootleg Salesforce? Trojan Horse? Investigating the CRM App at the heart of Salesforce's China Investment in 800apps.com

Looks like Bootleg Salesforce, but
probably 'heavy respect'

China is interesting. Certainly when I was over there, some of the things I was being offered at markets such as the 'iPhone4' were suspect to say the least. Completely serious sell, but on close inspection it looked like something from Toys-R-Us.

A few days ago I read an interesting story about Salesforce.com investing in a Chinese CRM company called 800apps. After looking further into this, I found something particularly interesting about the CRM app they have developed. At first glance I thought it was salesforce.com itself looking at the distant screenshots. Then I got a trial, and the iPhone4 incident popped back into my head...

I am particularly interested in this because I have been trying to follow the Chinese Cloud Computing market to see how it stacks up in relation to the West.  Stories of 20kmx20km datacentres being constructed, billions of money pouring into it, it seems they are getting together one hell of a capability. This interview with Reuven Cohen of Enomaly gives as good an insight as I have seen.

Anyway, I have done some digging around over the past few months to see if salesforce.com have any traction there. The general impression that I got was that there are companies who do great salesforce.com work over there like Meginfo in Beijing. I had the pleasure of chatting with their director, Aaron Lau when I was over there: a dev at Meginfo goes through 8 months worth of training! But companies like this are more likely to service overseas companies, the US etc - I don't think companies that originate in China buy much into procuring a SaaS solution from somewhere like the US.

Ok, now back to 800apps. Like I said, I looked at the screenshots on the website and it looked like Salesforce.com. However reading some background information on the website, it gave the impression it is a different product:

 "Launched World first Chinese PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) on-line application software development platform 800APP Native. Just one month after Salesforce.com's launch of a similar product."


Right, so it's not Salesforce then. But I was curious so I signed up for the 'free version' so I could have a click around. After a healthy bit of missing around with Chinese forms and Google Translate, I finally completed the basic details to get an account, and got an email with my login details. Like Salesforce, there is a login link on the 800apps website which takes me to a login screen:

Once logged in, the home screen is quite familiar:

It looks very much like an older version of Salesforce. The thing that made me certain that there is no co-incidence in similarity was when I went to create a new record:

Its just too similar. The way a mandatory field is highlighted, the convention for Lookups, even the positioning of the 'Save' buttons. But it is NOT Salesforce. I had a quick check of the setup area, and although extremely similar, proves it is not the Force.com platform as I know it:

Can't create custom objects. 'Supply and Demand' standard object? 'Set Indexes' button? Not Salesforce, but not far off! 


So what IS this? Does it include any Salesforce code, or is it just heavily influenced by the platform? And interestingly, why have Salesforce chosen to invest in this company? If there is no existing link between 800apps and Salesforce, it seems that rather than Salesforce getting annoyed, they have chosen to invest. After all, Salesforce themselves tend to take heavy influence from Facebook etc, so they can probably empathise here. It may be a very clever way for Salesforce to get a footing in China in a kind of Trojan Horse way, and maybe one day the 800apps customers will receive an 'upgrade' to what is actually the latest version of the 'real' Salesforce.com?