SalesForce.com: "The Infrastructure is the Product"
SalesForce.com announced on Monday that it's making its proprietary APEX programming language available to customers and third party developers. The folks at InfoWorld and ZDNet say it's big news. Now users can customize SalesForce's hosted apps rather than running them as-is. I thought you might also be interested in Nicholas Carr's analysis:
Last year, I questioned Salesforce's decision to run its software-as-a-service application on its own infrastructure rather than have that infrastructure hosted by a hardware utility. [ThePlanet-EV1's Doug Erwin made the same point during our HostingCon video panel , BTW.] Now, I understand the rationale for the decision: the infrastructure is the product.
What Salesforce is doing is certainly part of a big tsunami in business computing, a tsunami that does indeed mark the transition away from the client-server age into what I've called the third age of IT. At the center of that age will stand not the PC but the utility-class data center, providing companies with at once greater efficiency and greater flexibility.
In other news, I was flipping through the Economist on the plane and read about Fulfillment by Amazon. Yep, Amazon now offers inventory warehousing, shipping and returns processing - in addition to web hosting.
So, SalesForce.com = hosting + customizable applications. Amazon.com = hosting + logistics. Will web hosting companies be able to compete by offering web hosting + nothing else? Hostway's John Martis says absolutely; he thinks hosting as we know it has a long life ahead. Nonetheless, might it be worthwhile to start thinking about what's next?
One of the Web hosting industry's longest-standing citizens, Isabel Wang is also a high-tech enthusiast. Through her WHIR blog, she examines the impact emerging Web technologies will have on the Web hosting business, and on the motivations of hosting consumers.
Isabel has been in the web hosting ... (Read full bio)
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This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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