Salesforce.com today announced Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture which includes a pay-per-login utility pricing model for the Force.com Platform, and Force.com Development-as-a-Service, a new set of tools and services that will harness cloud computing for application development. Force.com will be providing the global infrastructure and services for database, logic, workflow, integration, user interface, application development and application exchange.

“Cloud computing, or Platform-as-a-Service, has enormous potential for the enterprise,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Cloud computing offers almost unlimited computing power and collaboration at a massive scale. With Force.com Platform-as-Service, we are providing the necessary building blocks to make cloud computing real for the enterprise.”

As part of the Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture, salesforce.com is announcing a new utility pricing model for the Force.com Platform to give customers the flexibility to deploy Platform-as-a-Service applications to users throughout their enterprise based on their usage needs and patterns. CIOs and IT managers now have the power to deploy Force.com for unlimited or per-login usage for regular or occasional users depending on the specific needs of their enterprise.

Salesforce.com customers have already created more than 50,000 custom applications with the Force.com Platform, such as Accounts Receivable, Bug Enhancement Tracking, Employee Compliance and Training, Emergency Room Staffing, Expense Reporting, Food Ingredient Management, Recruiting, Time Management, and many others. The new Force.com Edition utility pricing model will enable customers to deploy these custom applications throughout their enterprises in ways that make sense base on employee usage patterns.

For example, users in the Account Payable department may use Expense Reporting applications on a daily basis and need unlimited access to them for processing and accounting. Sales or marketing personnel may only need to access an Expense Reporting application once per month or a few times per quarter. The IT department can now take advantage of Force.com to deploy the Expense Reporting application in an unlimited fashion in the Account Payable department, and have per-login usage for sales and marketing employees.

The list price is $5.00 per login with a maximum of five logins per user per month, and will be offered at a special promotional price of $0.99 per login now through the end of 2008.  Customers must purchase five logins per named user which are good for one month.  Force.com Cloud pricing is for occasional-use, widely-deployed apps and is available for platform use only and not for CRM applications. For more frequent users (more than 5 logins per month), Force.com pricing begins at $50 per user per month.

The Force.com PaaS encompasses a complete feature set for the creation of business applications, including the ability to create any database on demand, a workflow engine for managing collaboration between users, the Apex Code programming language for building complex logic, the Force.com Web Services API for programmatic access, mash-ups, and integration with other applications and data, Visualforce for a framework to build any User-Interface-as-a-Service, and now Force.com Development-as-a-Service to provide a comprehensive set of tools and services for developers, partners and customers.