Salesforce.com Goes Into Web Hosting, Partners With Amazon And Facebook

Eric Krangel | November 3, 2008 1:25 PM

Salesforce.com's (CRM) ticker symbol may be "CRM," but three major developments are in the works to radically expand the company's support for cloud computing beyond just customer relationship management.

The company introduced a new add-on to its suite of services called "Force.com sites." The new feature allows companies with data on Salesforce's servers to easily make Web sites based off that data available over the Internet. Before, that data had to be extracted from Salesforce with clunky programming links and imported into Web sites created with some other product.
Salesforce also announced a new deal with Amazon (AMZN), letting developers code tie-in applications for force.com with the back-end processing running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). Cloud cross-polination deals appear increasingly common; Amazon and Microsoft announced their own deal in recent weeks even as Redmond moves forwards with Azure.
In a third announcement today, Salesforce released tools to build force.com applications for Facebook. We're skeptical about what's useful in Facebook for Marc Benioff's enterprise customers (the press release cites "areas like recruiting, productivity and project collaboration"), but if Salesforce's consulting partners want to work on the Facebook platform, now they have the tools.

Subscribe to SAI: RSS, email newsletter (no spam)

Share:

4 Comments

clickbot said:

Nov. 03, 2:08 PM

Facebook and EC2/S3 hooks?. Sounds like this stuff was released about a year too late.

Cloud computing is expensive.

Heekyung Kim (URL) said:

Nov. 03, 2:22 PM

Thanks for the coverage, Eric. On the third point, enterprises are already spending $mm's in consumer technologies for enterprise use, especially in financial services with huge armies of young people. I have been pretty skeptical, too, but was surprised to find that there are software companies like WorkLight (www.myworklight.com) that are getting some meaningful traction, developing apps on consumer platforms like facebook to better engage the younger employees at large firms (full disclosure: Neither my firm nor I have any relationship with WorkLight). Making force.com DE available for facebook apps will def accelerate the dev cycle, but I am still not sure how big the addressable market is. Also, whereas Facebook is a free platform, Force.com charges $/user/mo to deploy, so I am also curious how the pricing dynamics would work out. (Would your pay $50/mo/user for a recruiting facebook app? You might).

Anyway, thanks so much for the post!

Simmons said:

Nov. 03, 4:58 PM

Benioff needs a beauty makeover. With $1B net worth you'd think he could afford a haircut.

Roscoe said:

Nov. 04, 10:20 AM

Jumped the shark.