Salesforce.com Announces Force

Tradition mandates a significant product or service announcement by the host of any successful industry conference or tradeshow. With Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2007 just days away, the SFDC world is charged with optimism regarding the expected announcement of the new Force.com platform.

Force.com is a “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) offering that provides custom application design, development and hosting for Salesforce.com customers.  More importantly, this platform is not strictly focused on CRM.  So, for the hundreds of customers seeking to port or build dozens of internal custom applications that are not part of the SFDC core CRM or the AppExchange, this platform may be the answer.

Such a platform has great potential in the PaaS space. For company IT managers, it may reduce the complexity of deployment as all those miscellaneous widgets and process automations are hosted externally on one unified platform. Integrations with in-house systems will inevitably be necessary, but Force.com may ease pain here as well since applications may share data models, security profiles, and interfaces, further reducing the touch points with the in-house infrastructure.

Attendees to Dreamforce will get to test-drive the VisualForce development tools, which make use of HTML, AJAX and Flex to build more visually appealing user interfaces for deployment within the Force.com platform. General availability of Force.com is expected in the second half of 2008.

With several of us at Sundog in attendance at Dreamforce 2007, stay tuned for updates on where this new SFDC innovation might lead.