With cloud-based Salesforce CRM now the leading CRM solution, more and more application developers are turning to the Force.com platform. With its power to innovate, Force.com revolutionises custom application development, making it possible to create robust, enterprise-class solutions for almost any business need, fast.

Enterprise Application Development Old and New

• The old way: inefficient application-building Traditional ways of creating and running business applications are just too cumbersome today, with far too many moving parts to buy, install, configure, and maintain—including hardware and software. And the entire infrastructure needs constant maintenance to keep it working smoothly.
  With such an overhead burden, is it any surprise that custom application development slows down? Every tiny change in a complex computer environment sends ripples through the organisation, a set up which significantly reduces overall IT responsiveness, and hinders any company’s ability to address its constantly changing business needs. Instead, enterprise application development slows to a near-halt, with backlogs a fact of life. The result is that business managers struggle without the applications they need to run their business, and soldier on with homegrown systems on spreadsheets, personal databases, or other unsupported platforms.
• The future is here: application development productivity in the cloud. With cloud computing and salesforce.com’s Force.com platform, application development takes place—and all applications run—entirely on the Web. All developers need is a Web browser.
  With just an Internet connection, your developers enter an application development environment and discover all the tools and resources they need. This way, they can develop complete enterprise applications without the cost and complexity of buying and maintaining an on-premises development infrastructure.
• More business value. Force.com impacts on the responsiveness of your IT systems, making it easy to add developers instantly, anywhere in the world, and give them full access to application development resources. They build and deploy solutions fast, reduce application development cycle time, accelerate the response to user requests, and deliver the IT agility required to take advantage of fast-breaking business opportunities.

Custom Application Development with Force.com

Force.com delivers a complete technology stack covering the ground from database and security to workflow and user interface—so you can focus on assembling, building, and deploying solutions at once. This makes custom application development easy without the headaches and expense of buying, configuring, and managing development hardware and software.

Force.com’s powerful yet easy-to-use application development and deployment accelerates innovation. It’s easy to develop and then immediately deploy your solutions to the Force.com cloud-based infrastructure.

With Force.com it’s easy to implement business logic with workflow rules, approval processes, and custom code. You can store structured data, support Web browsers and mobile devices, integrate with other applications, do reporting and analytics, and scale up or down—all with the sub-second response time, high availability, and security you need to run your business applications.

Custom Application Development: Build and Run Your Entire Business in the Cloud

The Force.com platform is the fastest path to complex enterprise application development. Right now there are more than 100,000 custom applications running on Force.com, and the platform supports more than 150 million transactions per day.

Companies and ISVs are using Force.com to build applications across the entire spectrum of business functions and industries: supply chain management, billing, audit, tax calculation, event management, compliance tracking, brand management, pricing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, billing, HR, payment processing, employee on-boarding, claims processing, and much more.

Enterprise Application Development Made Easy

Traditional custom application development platforms supply only the core services of database access and containers for logic and presentation. That’s why you need other software to create your entire application as well as additional components to run the data centre that supports the platform.

With Force.com, you get a full enterprise application development stack—including a complete user interface to your data, comprehensive reporting and analytic capabilities, a flexible security and sharing model, and workflow and approvals.

Access to Force.com is through a Web browser, with development and deployment taking place in the cloud. The platform provides a unique blend of clicks, components and code, which makes developers more productive. Application capabilities come from simple declarations of attributes through pre-built capabilities and extend to a fully flexible application development environment.

With simple clicks, Force.com lets you include rich functionality in all your applications. You can define your data structures and relationships, expose user interfaces to interact with this data, extend internal data with logical representations, and define workflow actions and approval processes. It’s simply a matter of shaping the built-in capabilities of the platform to your needs by setting the values of attributes.

What’s more, the entire Force.com reporting and analytics system is automatically built into all your applications too, giving you integrated functionality that lets you mine your data store for additional value.