Enterprise Cloud-Computing Solutions: the Force.com Platform

For each business problem they’re called on to solve, IT executives must decide whether it’s best to build a custom solution or find a third-party product.

Selecting the cloud-computing model from salesforce.com is a sound decision in either case. Whether you build with Force.com or buy through the Force.com AppExchange online marketplace, cloud-computing solutions are much faster and easier to deploy than traditional software, and deliver greater user satisfaction. The net result: Choosing the cloud-computing model gives you much higher ROI and lower cost of ownership.

Cloud-Computing Solutions: Build Them with Ease on Force.com

The Force.com platform is at the heart of salesforce.com’s enterprise cloud-computing model. It’s a developer’s dream: the ideal platform for building and deploying cloud-computing solutions.

Powerful point-and-click development tools are the key to the accelerated development process that makes our cloud-computing model so powerful. You can build complex data models, automate sophisticated business logic, and deploy highly customized user interfaces without writing a single line of code.

Plus, developers can apply their existing skills to the cloud-computing model by using our toolkits for the most popular development languages, including Java, VB.Net, C#, .NET, or open-source languages.

• Point-and-click Devlopment with our enterprise cloud-computing model.  Using only a Web browser, business users, administrators and developers alike can define the “blueprint” for a cloud-computing solution, including the data model, objects, forms, workflows, and more.
• Go with what you know. It’s so easy to integrate our cloud-computing solutions with other systems and create mashups with external services. Using the Force.com Web Services API with our development language toolkits allows you to create highly visual and interactive solutions based on the cloud-computing model. The Force.com API gives you access to all data stored in any Force.com cloud-computing solution.
• Apex Code: the language of the cloud-computing model. The Apex programming language greatly improves the scope and depth of the cloud-computing solutions developers can build. Apex brings real granular control to the cloud-computing model. You can design and build all kinds of cloud-computing solutions, customie objects, create new buttons, and write completely new applications from scratch.

The real power of our cloud-computing model comes from the ability, using Apex, to develop new behaviors and business logic with code that runs directly on salesforce.com’s servers. Your developers gain the same power and flexibility to create cloud-computing solutions as our R&D staff without the headache of owning or maintaining infrastructure and hardware.

Enterprise Cloud-Computing Solutions for Sale

Frequently, organisations face business problems for which others have already built cloud-computing solutions. Finding and buying these applications is easy with the Force.com AppExchange, your online marketplace of cloud-computing applications.

The Force.com AppExchange features more than 800 cloud-computing apps built by us at salesforce.com, our partners, and the developer community. All of themintegrate seamlessly with Salesforce CRM and are completely customisable to fit your unique business needs.

As an important aspect of our enterprise cloud-computing model, these third-party applications can be integrated with Salesforce CRM using the Force.com Web Services API. Salesforce.com averages hundreds of millions of API transactions per day, which shows just how widespread and successful our cloud-computing model has become.

Application Development Using the Enterprise Cloud-Computing Model

Just as publishing technology evolved from paper and ink to bits and bytes, and information about anything in the world became instantly accessible, the cloud-computing model makes it possible to create and deploy enterprise-class applications for your business needs that are instantly accessible to anyone, wherever they are.

Salesforce.com’s enterprise cloud-computing model, as found in the Force.com platform, lets IT innovate while it bypasses the costs associated with servers, point-to-point connections, upgrades, individual software solutions, middleware, and the staff needed to manage it all.

Force.com-based applications bring the power and success of the enterprise cloud-computing model to not just sales, service, and marketing, but your whole company.  New innovations are now possible through a combination of point-and-click wizards, development language toolkits, and the Apex programming language. The applications you create run natively on the Force.com platform, delivering all the benefits of the multitenant architecture inherent in our cloud-computing model, like built-in security, reliability, upgradeability, and ease of use.

By removing the problems specific to traditional application development, the cloud-computing model allows developers to concentrate on creating solutions that deliver real business value.

Visualforce: the Cloud-Computing Model Applied to Any Interface on Any Device

With Visualforce, you can design enterprise cloud-computing solutions with interfaces for any screen on any device. Visualforce utilises the powerful logic and workflow intelligence of the Apex programming language, and gives you the flexibility to apply the cloud-computing model to any user experience you can think of.

Visualforce uses a page-based model for your cloud-computing solutions, and is built on standard HTML presentation technologies. Just like our cloud-computing model, user experiences designed in Visualforce directly leverage the data, logic, and workflows created with other Force.com components.

Force.com Sites: Run Your Web Sites on the Cloud-Computing Model

You can now create public Web sites and applications that run as native cloud-computing solutions on the Force.com platform with Force.com Sites. It increases the scope of our cloud-computing model by utilising the flexibility of Visualforce, which means it’s easy to extend your existing applications to reach new users on intranets, external Web sites, and online communities.

To achieve this, Force.com Sites makes use of relational databases, workflow engines, and advanced integration features, so you can easily build cloud-computing solutions with interfaces for any device using standard Web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, Flash, or Flex.

And you can do all this in days, or weeks, rather than months or even years, thereby putting the power and increased productivity of the enterprise cloud-computing model within reach of all your employees, customers, and prospects in record time.