Cloud Computing Platforms

Cloud computing platforms, particularly Force.com’s platform as a service, offer many advantages over the traditional model.

• Cloud computing’s time to value is unprecedented. Salesforce.com’s cloud computing platform, Force.com, reduces the risk involved in implementing business applications like CRM by eliminating the need for any initial capital investments, making the pathway to CRM success exceptionally short. Introducing salesforce.com usually take less than a month and rarely exceeds 3 months, compared to 12 months or longer when compared with traditional client/server software. According to a recent study by Triple Tree and the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), platform as a service deployments are 50 to 90 percent more rapid, with a total cost of ownership five to ten times less than with traditional software.
• Platform as a service is less expensive initially—and in the long run. It’s easy to see why a multitenant, cloud computing solution is much less expensive at the start. There’s no hardware to acquire, scale, and maintain, no operating systems, database servers, or application servers to install, no specialists to recruit and/or staff to manage it all, and no need for upgrades. However, what is even more noticeable are the long-term savings. Gartner estimates that two thirds of IT time and budgets is spent on maintaining infrastructure and dealing with updates. This is not the case with cloud computing platforms. Cloud computing platforms also have limited, if any, hidden costs. A fully-loaded, five-year total cost of ownership (TCO) study for a 50-seat project which considered several often hidden cost factors, ranging from needs analyses to internal downtime, showed the TCO of a premise-based solution to be 2.5 times higher than a cloud computing solution. .
• Upgrades are easy with cloud computing. Customers running applications on cloud computing platforms get instant deployment of new versions, so everybody is always on the most current version. Since customisations and integrations are unaffected by upgrades, change management discussions are able to focus on immediately taking advantage of the latest features and innovations available with each release.
• Platform as a service promises better service delivery. Due to the cloud computing model's tremendous economies of scale, and salesforce.com’s long-standing focus on service delivery, the Force.com platform as a service can provide higher service levels than most companies can achieve on their own. We use the best technologies, policies and procedures to ensure security at every level – facilities, application, and network; to ensure maximum uptime and continuous availability; and to provide a performance record we are proud of. See for yourself: http://trust.salesforce.com.
• Cloud computing is much more scalable. Successful businesses are continually changing and growing: adding staff members, processing increasing numbers of transactions, launching new products and services, and carrying out mergers and acquisitions. These events can suddenly change your business needs. Traditional enterprise software is expensive to scale because of the complexity and cost of scaling each layer of the hardware and software stacks, which often requires difficult system replacements and data migrations using IT employees who will therefore be taken off other essential tasks. Customer-specific systems developed with J2EE, .NET, or open source tools are similarly difficult to scale because of infrastructure issues and changing or unforeseen business requirements. Thanks to cloud computing, salesforce.com’s Force.com platform as a service grows, scales, and adapts with constantly changing business environments.
• Customisation is greatly simplified with cloud computing platforms. Users of locally-installed applications have no choice but to wait weeks or months for any kind of modification. The Force.com platform as a service was designed to be easy to use from the start in order to make performing basic customisation to the user interface and underlying data objects simple, so that even business users could customise in minutes, without programming. Without the burden of fulfilling constant requests for minor customisations, IT teams are then free to focus on performing more advanced customisations and automations.
• Cloud computing is easier on administrators. With the Force.com platform as a service and Salesforce CRM software, administrators can adapt processes and define how information is viewed by different segments and work groups, while ensuring that users can only access the information they are supposed to access.
• True value and innovation is nurtured in cloud computing platforms. By eradicating many of the problems related to traditional application development, the cloud computing model frees developers to focus on developing solutions that deliver real value to your business. Salesforce.com assists developers with a host of tools and resources—including a point-and-click customisation tool, toolkits for the most popular development environments, the Force.com programming language Apex Code, as well as developer.force.com. The growth of the Force.com community has been quick, resulting in hundreds of innovative platform as a service solutions being made accessible to customers via the Force.com AppExchange directory, salesforce.com’s popular marketplace for pre-integrated software-as-a-service applications.

The Original Platform as a Service: Force.com

As well as powering Salesforce CRM applications, Salesforce.com’s platform as a service Force.com is also the fastest way to build and deploy other enterprise applications. Rather than months, application development can now take a matter of days and weeks, thanks to the cloud computing platform model. Force.com brings innovation through its easy-to-use cloud computing development model, unlike separately-designed software and hardware products. Applications can now be assembled with clicks, code and components, and instantly deployed to the Salesforce PaaS.

"Today we spend 63 percent of our time and budget on servers and just to keep the lights on—that is pure cost, no business value. With Force.com, we can outsource the infrastructure and focus on creating innovation and real business value." CIO of Fortune 1000 company.

• Developers and IT love the Force.com Platform as a Service. Force.com means freedom from continual infrastructure maintenance, upgrading, and the burden of scaling, leaving more time to focus on core development work and creating true business value.
• ISVs love the Force.com Platform as a Service, too. Salesforce.com offers not only the platform as a service, with the Force.com AppExchange marketplace it also acts as a marketing and distribution channel, presenting the products ISVs develop on the Force.com cloud computing platform to a highly-qualified set of businesses seeking cloud computing solutions.