Salesforce.com spent the second day of its annual Dreamforce user
conference trying to prove it's no longer just a CRM company. It
got help in this area from partners BMC Software and CA, both of
which announced they'll be offering apps built on Force.com next
year. Customers Avon, Japan Post and Kelly Services have already
built apps on the cloud computing platform.
Still, Salesforce.com knows it needs rapidly faster adoption of
Force.com to retain its lead as one of the most important companies
in enterprise cloud computing, particularly as Microsoft, Google,
and others intensify their efforts in this area. Salesforce.com
announced Thursday that it would waive subscription payments for
the first 100 users of any first-time application that a company
builds on Force.com.
And while Salesforce.com had 15,000 people show up for the
conference -- a comparatively high number for a software company
with $1.3 billion in annual revenues -- a large portion were other
software companies and independent developers looking to sell apps
they've built on Force.com.
During the morning session, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said
that with BMC and CA, the company had accomplished a longtime goal
of having large software companies develop for Force.com. BMC CEO
Bob Beauchamp appeared on stage, and said BMC would offer before
summer of 2010 an application it built, in two months, which lets
IT staffers identify and track server connection problems for PC
users. Pricing wasn't discussed, but presumably BMC will offer the
app as a subscription and pay a portion of that fee to
Salesforce.com, which will host the app in its data center.
CA CEO John Swainson, also appearing onstage, said his company next
year would offer a developer tool for agile development that will
run on Force.com. "There will be a pre-cloud era and a post-cloud
era just as there was a pre-mainframe era and a post-mainframe
era," Swainson said. "This is the most profound change I've seen in
IT in 30 years."
But will Salesforce.com continue to be at the head of this change?
With Force.com, its cloud computing market play is for what's
sometimes called the platform-as-a-service (Paas). It's a market
Microsoft is pursuing, with the launch of Azure next year, and one
Google wants with Google App Engine and Amazon with Amazon Web
Services. Within a few years, cloud-focused developers and
consultants will be prioritizing which PaaS vendors they should
work for.
Salesforce.com has a good head start. Japan Post, one of Japan's
largest companies, has built a customer information app (unrelated
to Salesforce CRM) and an accident reporting app for use by 70,000
employees. And Avon has a Facebook application running on Force.com
that helps Avon reps pitch products to their Facebook friends.
Salesforce.com has dozens more large customers that started out
with CRM but are experimenting and rolling out apps on
Force.com.
Most Force.com apps are small and task-specific; Salesforce.com
reports more than 135,000 applications have been built on Force.com
platform and more than 200,000 developers have joined its
developers' program. By comparison, Microsoft has just rolled out
Azure to select developers, but has millions of developers using
its existing technologies.
Salesforce.com's challenge in the next few years will be to
convince even more CIOs and developers that it's no longer just a
CRM company.