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.
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