Build or Buy?

The Force.com Platform Is the Answer

Implementing technology solutions to solve business problems is the enormous task facing IT organizations. For each issue that needs to be addressed, IT executives must decide whether it makes the most sense to build a custom solution or find a third-party product, weighing such factors as competing priorities, availability of internal resources, budget, existing infrastructure concerns, and the ongoing maintenance required of the new system.

Salesforce.com has a better solution. We’ve made both building and buying new solutions, as well as implementing them into your existing infrastructure, much easier than with traditional client/server applications. So that IT can get back to the business of focusing on innovation, not infrastructure.

 
Build

The Force.com platform is a developer’s dream—it’s the ideal platform for building and deploying on-demand business applications.


Application development is accelerated with our powerful point-and-click development tool, Force.com Builder. Developers can build complex data models, automate sophisticated business logic, and deploy highly customized user interfaces without writing a single line of code.


Additionally, developers can leverage their existing skills by using our toolkits for the most popular development languages, including Java, VB.Net, C#, .NET, or open-source languages. And, with the release of the AJAX toolkit, salesforce.com provides support for creating highly visual and interactive applications.


With the upcoming release of salesforce.com’s own programming language, Apex, developers will have highest granularity of control—to do everything from customizing objects to creating new buttons to writing completely new applications from scratch. Because these applications will run natively on the Force.com platform, developers are freed from issues associated with client-side applciations.

 
Buy

Frequently, organizations need applications to solve business problems that others have already successfully tackled. The AppExchange directory is the first stop for businesses in the market for new applications. The world’s first on-demand application marketplace, the AppExchange features more than 400 applications—built by salesforce.com, our partners, and the Force.com developer community—that are pre-integrated with Salesforce and completely customizable to fit your unique business needs.


If your heart is set on a third-party application, you can integrate it with Salesforce using the Web Services Force.com API. In fact, salesforce.com averages 150 million monthly API transactions, proving just how widespread and successful Salesforce intgrations have become.