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.

• Creating with our enterprise cloud-computing model: as easy as point-and-click.  With just a Web browser, business users, administrators, and developers alike can define the metadata that results in the “blueprint” for a cloud-computing solution, including the data model, objects, forms, workflows, and more.
• Go with what you know. It’s easy to integrate our enterprise cloud-computing model with other systems and also create mashups with external services. Just use the Force.com Web Services API in combination with our development language toolkits to create highly visual and interactive solutions based on the cloud-computing model. The Force.com API provides direct 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 dramatically expands the scope and depth of the cloud-computing solutions developers can build. Apex brings truly granular control to the enterprise cloud-computing model. You can create all kinds of cloud-computing solutions and do everything from customizing objects to creating new buttons to writing completely new applications from scratch.

The beauty of our cloud-computing model is that with Apex, you can develop new behaviors and business logic with code that runs directly on salesforce.com’s servers. This capability frees developers from having to own or manage hardware and infrastructure. Instead, they gain the same power and flexibility to create cloud-computing solutions as our R&D staff.

Enterprise Cloud-Computing Solutions for Sale

Frequently, organizations face business problems for which others have already built cloud-computing solutions. Finding and buying these applications is easier than ever with the Force.com AppExchange—an online marketplace of cloud-computing applications.

The Force.com AppExchange features more than 800 cloud-computing solutions built by salesforce.com, our partners, and the developer community. All are preintegrated with Salesforce CRM and completely customizable to fit your unique business needs.

As important components of our enterprise cloud-computing model, these third-party applications can be integrated with Salesforce CRM using the Force.com Web Services API. In fact, salesforce.com averages hundreds of millions of API transactions per day, demonstrating 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 to bits—putting information about anything in the world at our fingertips—the cloud-computing model makes it possible to create and deploy robust, enterprise-class applications for any business need that are instantly accessible to anyone, anywhere.

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

Force.com-based applications bring the power and success of the enterprise cloud-computing model to your whole company—not just sales, service, and marketing.  New types of innovation are now possible through a combination of “no programming” point-and-click wizards, development language toolkits, and the Apex programming language. The resulting applications run entirely on the Force.com platform, delivering the benefits of the multitenant architecture native to our cloud-computing model—including built-in security, reliability, upgradeability, and ease of use.

By eliminating the problems specific to traditional application development, the cloud-computing model frees developers to focus on creating solutions that deliver real business value.

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

Visualforce lets you design enterprise cloud-computing solutions with interfaces for any experience—literally any look and feel—on any screen. By leveraging the powerful logic and workflow intelligence of the Apex programming language, Visualforce gives you the flexibility to apply the cloud-computing model to deliver any user experience you can dream up on any device.

Visualforce provides a page-based model for your cloud-computing solutions that is built on standard HTML and Web presentation technologies. In line with the overall scheme of 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

With Force.com Sites, you can now create public Web sites and applications that run as native cloud-computing solutions on the Force.com platform. Force.com Sites enlarges the scope of our cloud-computing model by harnessing the flexibility of Visualforce—making it a snap to transform your existing applications to reach new users on intranets, external Web sites, and online communities.

Under the hood of Force.com Sites, you’ll find a relational database, workflow engine, and advanced integration features. You can 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 years, placing the power and productivity of the enterprise cloud-computing model within reach of all your employees, customers, and prospects.