Salesforce to Salesforce requires both parties to subscribe to Salesforce.com's services, but the vendor believes it will find success due to the size of its subscriber base, which will reach 1 million this month, according to the company.

There is a long-standing need for such data sharing, says Bruce Francis, Salesforce.com's VP of corporate strategy. "Every business depends on partners. ... And you're constantly needing to exchange information with those parties," Francis says.

Francis argues that many businesses still interact through cumbersome means, such as by e-mailing Excel spreadsheets to each other. "That information is out of sync the minute you hit 'send'," he says.

Demonstrating the new features, Elay Cohen, senior product line director for Salesforce.com, showed how companies can share CRM-related data, such as sales leads, as well as other types of information, such as job openings. The new tools also have an update function to keep data in sync across companies.

The interface lets users apply privacy settings on shared data "down to the field level," Cohen says.

Cohen says the new tools -- at least conceptually -- have been incubating for a long time: "From the very beginning, our underlying architecture was developed knowing this was going to be released."

The new features are available now and compatible with all Salesforce.com editions, but only Platform, Enterprise and Ultimate edition customers can initiate a data-exchange connection, according to Cohen. Doing so will cost those customers $1,200 per year for each connection.

Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research in Stoughton, Massachusetts, says the new capability "is much more important to business processes than anything application-oriented, per se."

He adds that its goal is reminiscent of past efforts by partnering companies to integrate their mainframe computers, but could prove much less expensive.