Given the resources required to provide software-as-a-service, it seems practical that companies should offer available resources to paying customers. Chicago company Salesforce.com, the worlds biggest online Customer Relationship Management solutions provider, is the latest to enter the ‘Cloud computing’ arena, sharing its resources with developers and allowing third party applications on its infrastructure. The company’s new platform, Force.com, utilizes Visualforce, the company’s existing framework for building and deploying user interfaces. This means developers can create their applications on Force.com and utilize Salesforce.com features such as payment and billing systems and subscriber relationship solutions. They will also be able to “publish data to any Web site”, or “build public applications that run entirely on Force.com”. In future the platform will also integrate with Facebook and Google application environments, allowing developers to utilize features from both.
Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff announced the company’s move into the Cloud during the recent Dreamforce event: "cloud computing, or platform-as-a-service, has enormous potential for the enterprise. 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."
