Salesforce Launches Earthforce, Goes Carbon Neutral

• By Isabel Wang on January 16, 2007

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Todd Woody at Business 2.0 reports that Salesforce.com plans to offset greenhouse gas emissions produced by its offices and data centers. The company will help finance wind farms as well as a dairy farm methane energy project.

VP Corporate Strategy Bruce Francis says he expects environmental impact to become an increasingly important factor in customers' technology purchasing decisions. Carbon neutrality is "quickly moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have".

Salesforce's 2006 carbon emissions totaled nearly 19,700 tons, which costs $126,000 to offset. I found the amount surprisingly modest, considering that the company provides hosted software to 556,000 subscribers. The goodwill it generates by demonstrating its environmental responsibility is certainly worth more than 2 cents per user per month.

In other news, Salesforce also came out with a developer preview release of Apex, a Java-like programming language for building applications that run atop Salesforce's infrastructure. CNet's Dawn Kawamoto says Salesforce now offers 500 third party apps on its AppExchange platform; there have been over 20,000 installs by more than 7,500 customers. Later this year Salesforce will launch AppStore, an iTunes-like ecommerce operation which will provide payment processing for third party apps.

I continue to be convinced that Salesforce will get into SaaS hosting. Wouldn't it make sense for applications that are built with Apex and sold in AppStore to run in Salesforce's data center? Even in the meantime, Salesforce's hosted apps already compete with companies like The Planet for small businesses' IT outsourcing dollars. Given a choice between leasing servers for installing their own software or running their business from the cloud, which will they prefer?

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