By Kevin Dobbs
Montclair Advisors, LLC
Dreamforce 2010 was in San Francisco last week and there were a lot of announcements and it is only now that I am starting post my thoughts. This post is going be around Force.com 2 and how Salesforce has rethought their approach, repackaged their platform and now have relaunced their PaaS.
This table provides a quick summary of how Salesforce has repackaged the Force.com 2 Platform.
What is interesting is that several of these offerings are just new packaging concepts and several are net-new products. Let me walk you through the suite:
This is basically the original Force platform using their proprietary 4GL, point-click-language APEX that has been repackaged as a departmental application platform. What is interesting is that this environment is not just for departments, large enterprises like Japan Post and Thomson Reuters have done very large Cloud development projects using this platform. I think that Salesforce realizes that due to its proprietary nature, most organizations will be attracted to Force.com but would prefer a more open and portable development environment. Applications built with Appforce are also able to be easily integrated with Salesforce’s collaboration capability Chatter
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This is a development environment specifically designed for building websites without having to write code. There was a great demonstration of how you can build and modify websites, even for mobile devices, using their drag-and-drop interface. This will be popular with firms that do a lot of campaigns and need to design a lot of landing pages which can be tied back to Salesforce. Like the Appforce products, Siteforce can be linked to Chatter to add social and mobile features to websites. This was an existing capability inside of Force.com that has now been exposed as a new offering. The marketing materials we were given state that there have been more than 20,000 website built using Siteforce.
This platform is a result of a partnership with VMware, that opens up the Force.com platform to more than 6 million Java developers. Using VMforce, developers can now run their Java-based applications on the Force.com platform, similar to what they would do it they were using Amazon EC2. Developers can also use Java IDE’s like Spring or Eclipse as well as other open standards. With my clients, this is a popular approach, it provides some leverage with existing Java-based apps as well as professional developers prefer to develop in this type of environment, rather than using a 4GL point-and-click product. VMforce is currently in beta and will be ready for general availability in 2011.
In a really interesting move, Salesforce went out an purchased a leading provider of Ruby-on-Rails for $212M in cash, $27M in stock and another $10M for un-vested employee shares. Like VMforce, Heroku will offer developers a way to write applications using Ruby and then run them on Force.com. The rumor was that VMware had made a run at the firm several months ago, but wanted to remain independent. Marc Benioff in his keynote indicated that Heroku would remain independent from Salesforce, I am assuming in the way VMware has remained independent from EMC. Several benifits for Heroku as part of Salesforce will be access to their 87,000 customers as well as their technology stack including Chatter. Today, there are more than 100,000 websites and applications written using their platform including BestBuy and FlightCaster.
In another re-packaging move Salesforce has taken the Force.com platform and created a new program to help larger ISV’s to build their next generation applications on top of their PaaS. This is a program that contains services and tools to help Independent Software Vendors to move their apps to the Cloud. Salesforce provides development services, trails and provisioning, connections to AppExchange and application monitoring along with their multi-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Some early adopter ISV’s include Blackboard (who did a quick little demo), BMC (RemedyForce) and CA (Agile Vision).
Salesforce continues to promote their on-line application marketplace, which is similar to what Apple offers with their App Market, and how has over 1,000 applications available. Some interesting facts provided by Salesforce about the AppExchange include there have been more than 360,000 application test drives through the AppExchange, nearly 700,000 application installs and more than $1B invested in companies who are on the AppExchange.
Another interesting announcement is that Salesforce has gone into the database business. When I first heard this, I thought it wasn’t necessarily a good idea, but then I read that they were just repackaging a gigantic Cloud-based version of Oracle and selling the database by-the-slice. Apparently Oracle thinks this is not a secure approach to selling databases, but let’s see how this all works out. Amazon has something similar with their RDS offering.
The result is that Salesforce now has a suite of offerings that are designed to meet the needs to enterprise customers, software companies, professional and casual developers. The strategic benefit of all of these offerings is to open up several new revenue streams for the company and continue their leadership momentum in the Cloud.
