Over 9,000 attendees made it to the annual San Francisco pilgrimage to
hear the high priest of SaaS kickoff the event. This year’s theme
focused on the future of Cloud Computing, a focus on success, and how
much Salesforce loves its customers. Key product, technology, and
partnership announcements from the November 3 to 5 event include:

  • Force.com expands usage to new product and services. Force.com
    sites allows customers to publish Force.com data and apps to any site,
    basically supporting customer built web apps. SFDC will take care of
    domain, URL, RSS management, etc when customers run their Web apps on
    Force.com. Other expansions include Force.com for Amazon and Force.com
    for Facebook. On the Amazon front, SFDC also will support applications
    being built using Amazon web services, in effect creating a mega cloud.
    Facebook support allows developers to tap into the Facebook Platform
    and Facebook Connect. 

    POV:
    Movement to expand the platform into new B2C facing markets give SFDC
    credibility in new social media markets as well as taking the Cloud
    wars to the consumer. Consider this a continuation in the battle for
    domiance of IDE’s in the cloud.

  • CODA showcases its financial package on APEX for the North American market.
    While Coda2Go was launched at Dreamforce Europe in London last May,
    attendees at Dreamforce 2008 in SanFrancisco had a chance to see first
    hand how the 30 year old vendor had completed its rewrite. With
    enterprise financials built on this new platform, Salesforce.com
    customers now have more choice in financial solutions within the
    ecosystem.
    POV: Like many mid-market vendors, CODA had
    the opportunity to bet on the next platform and chose a SaaS approach
    over an on-premise middleware platform. Most mid-market vendors bet on
    a Microsoft VS.NET “Rainbow” Stack, IBM Websphere, or Progress
    Software. These middleware platforms allow companies to spend 10 to 15%
    of budget on tools and technology instead of a staggering 33% that many
    would spend if they built their own middleware. CODA’s decision is
    market leading for the industry and is reflective of its groundbreaking
    historical bets on HP3000 in the 70’s, VAX (DEC) in the 80’s, and
    AS/400’s (IBM) in the 90’s.
  • Glovia, a Fujitsu Company, builds order management on Force.com.
    Customers seeking lead to billing solutions in order management can now
    turn to the Glovia solution for order management, inventory,
    fulfillment, and billing. Glovia takes the order from Salesforce.com
    and brings it into the order maangement system giving it visiblity from
    prospect to invoice. Enterprises can also check status via the web or
    on a mobile device via Salesforce mobile.
    POV    :
    Salesforce.com’s ecosystem strategy allows other vendors to build key
    back office end to end processes. As more companies add to the
    ecosystem, SalesForce will continue to gain market relevance against
    enterprise vendors struggling to move to a true multi-tenant onDemand
    delivery model.

   

 

The bottom line – SaaS platforms continue to morph into cloud computing

Recent
decisions by CODA, Glovia, and a host of software vendors show that the
transition from on-premise middleware platforms to cloud-based
platforms has begun. Application development and delivery professionals
seeking new delivery models can benefit from these new platforms.
Force.com is gaining momentum and given its history will emerge as one
of the top 3 platforms for both customers and software vendors. The
real question out there – what will vendor lock-in look like in the
world of cloud computing? Will it be like the mainframe lock-ins 40
years prior?

Your POV.

Are you
considering a SaaS deployment? Will you move to the cloud? Are you a
software vendor looking at ditching your on-premise middleware
platform? Feel free to share with me your thoughts. You can post here
or send me a private email to rwang@forrester.com.

Copyright © 2008 R Wang. All rights reserved. Reposted from http://blog.softwareinsider.org