(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Software as a service provider Salesforce (www.salesforce.com) has built a reputation among enterprises over the years as being a leading provider of customer relationship management software.
With the emergence of new innovative SaaS and cloud technologies, the company has been able to continually develop new ways for businesses to manage and share business information over the Internet.
In an effort to move beyond its core offerings of sales-automation software, the company announced this week it has enhanced its Force.com sites platform. Further expanding on its previous cloud computing initiatives, the service enables customers to run their websites on the company’s pre-existing cloud infrastructure.
Customers will now be able to publish Force.com data and applications to any website, broadening their market reach to new users on intranets, external websites, and online communities.
“In order to make sophisticated web 2.0 applications you need a sophisticated platform,” says Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce. “This is an exciting new technology of the Force.com platform that’s going to broaden the use cases of what people do with our platform. The first one, which is what customers have been asking for the most, is expending data from your enterprise app to your website, the second one would be to transform an enterprise application into a website, and the last one is running an entire new website on our service.”
Like the services that Salesforce’s currently offers, Force.com sites run entirely in the cloud, enabling developers to easily re-purpose for the public the more than 85,000 business applications built on the Force.com platform.
Force.com Sites is offering a developer preview version (http://developer.force.com) starting December 2, just as it offered when it launched Visualforce, the Force.com platform’s framework for building and deploying user interfaces. Generally availability for Force.com sites is expected sometime in 2009.
The new offering has positioned the company on the same playing field as cloud computing heavy-weights such as Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com), Rackspace (www.rackspace.com), and Microsoft (www.microsoft.com), which recently launched its cloud computing service Windows Azure.
However, Kelman seems relatively unfazed by this hefty competition, explaining that Salesforce has more of a collaborative approach to cloud computing than a winner takes all attitude.
“It’s [Salesforce's] vision of the world that cloud computing as a platform strategies is fundamentally different than on-premise platforms,” says Kelman. “The world of cloud computing is not choosing one model of a vendor to run all your applications on and use all of their technologies… it’s about leveraging the best ideas for the best vendors and to have multiple platforms where customers can choose the best services from the best cloud computing vendors.
Through an early adopter program, several Salesforce customers and partners were able to use Force.com sites to build prototype applications on Force.com. Some of the participants in the early adopter program include global system integrator Astadia, SaaS provider Appirio, SaaS consulting firm Bluewolf, Human Capital Management applications provider Jobscience, application developer Model Metrics, and technology applications provider Sofia Works.
Force.com sites are available in four differenct categories — Group, Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited Editions — based on the webpage’s monthly page views, which range from 50,000 monthly views to 1,000,000. Customers also have the option to buy more as needed.
“That’s why we’ve been working very closely with the other cloud computing leaders, such as Google and Amazon and Facebook, to integrate our platforms so that our developers can use the right cloud computing services for the right platform vendor. We believe openness and vendor cooperation is the key to developer success. The cloud is really about making things easier; about letting developers focus on innovation and to outsource the commodity infrastructure so vendors can manage it for them.”
“We believe in open strategy and what we saw from Microsoft’s announcement last week is that they have a very different world,” says Kelman. “Their view of the world is to take all the complexities of .NET [Framework] and move it into a cloud, and we don’t think that’s aligned with developer success.”
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