Salesforce.com's Tour de Force

Salesforce.com announced company achievements and unveiled new service offerings and pricing. The new Force.com platform offers platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and development-as-a-service (DaaS) capabilities.

Focal Points:

• In San Francisco last week Salesforce.com revealed its Force.com offerings, which are designed to bring the power of the compute cloud to the enterprise, according to company executives. Force.com platform-as-a-service and development-as-a-service present companies with the ability to develop and operate their applications without the requirement of building in-house infrastructure. The DaaS offering provides developers the tools necessary for application life cycle management, including a Metadata API, an integrated development environment (IDE) built on Eclipse, a sandbox, and a code sharing capability so that developers can collaborate. These features are available now and can be obtained for free at http://developer.force.com.
• The Force.com PaaS components include the company's Application Exchange, user interface as a service, logic as a service, integration as a service, database as a service, and a global, trusted, secure infrastructure, company executives stated. PaaS has a workflow engine for managing collaboration, Web services API for programmatic access, mashups, and integration with other applications and data, and Visualforce, a framework for build user interfaces. The new Force.com also comes with new low end pricing for occasional users. Customers can pay $5/login for a maximum of five logins per month. For unlimited Force.com logins, the company is charging $50/user/month. There is a special pricing currently available of $0.99 per login for 2008. These fees are for the Force.com platform and do not include the Salesforce.com CRM applications.
• Salesforce.com reviewed the status with its multi-tenant, subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. The company is in a quiet period, as the quarter and year ends this month, and these numbers could not be made public. Nonetheless, the company stated they had in excess of 38,100 customers with more than 1 million subscribers. The company handles more than 130 million transactions per day with an average transaction speed of 210 milliseconds. There are more than 7.5 million database customizations, 160,000 SQL statements issued per second, and 79,000 workflow rules on the service. There are also 61,200 custom applications already on Force.com.

Experton Group believes Salesforce.com is more innovative than it gets credit for and that companies that employ their services should be able to enhance their application time to market and productivity while containing costs. Executives that use the vendor's developers, development platform, and programming interfaces should be able to generate user-friendly user applications that will be deployed more rapidly than traditional applications. Executives should consider the Force.com platform as one of many development and operational alternatives during the project approval and design cycles. Executives that are already working with Salesforce.com should push the vendor to discuss its thought leadership concepts on enterprise architecture for high availability, high performance computing, integrating and securing applications and systems, and Web 2.0 applications and trends.