Salesforce.com Lets Apex Fly

Third party developers can write applications that will run on the Salesforce.com architecture, as enabled through the Apex language and platform. The buzzwords that get smacked around the Internet like so many shuttlecocks at an Olympic badminton event, like "web-based apps," "software as a service," and "web services" have become more than just promising statements of the future of productivity. Those promises are being fulfilled today. Salesforce has been running its Dreamforce Conference this week, and somewhere company CEO Marc Benioff must be smiling. The cited a new understanding of Salesforce.com's motives with regards to the announcement: Last year, I questioned Salesforce's decision to run its software-as-a-service application on its own infrastructure rather than have that infrastructure hosted by a hardware utility. Now, I understand the rationale for the decision: the infrastructure is the product. While Salesforce's move opens up new opportunities for the firm, it also dramatically widens the competition it will face. As Carr noted, that competition includes Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. All three companies have taken steps toward being the center of the universe when it comes to freeing applications from the desktop. ZDNet's Between The Lines blogger Dan Farber With that kind of chippy eagerness to outdo each other, customers of firms like Salesforce should benefit from the ongoing battle to deliver solid, effective applications. Salesforce and the others do need to watch out for feature creep, to avoid packing too much unneeded functionality into a service. Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark murdok: David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.