Cloud Computing Platforms

Cloud computing platforms and the Force.com platform as a service in particular offer many advantages compared to the traditional on-premise model.

• Cloud computing’s time to value is unprecedented. Salesforce.com’s cloud computing platform, Force.com, minimizes the risk involved in implementing business applications like CRM by eliminating the need for up-front capital investment, making the path to CRM success extremely short. Salesforce implementations usually take less than a month and rarely exceed 3 months, compared to 12 months or longer 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 faster, 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 initially. There’s no hardware to purchase, scale, and maintain, no operating systems, database servers, or application servers to install, no consultants and staff to manage it all, and no need for upgrades. Even bigger news, however, is the long-term savings. Gartner estimates that two thirds of IT time and budgets is spent on maintaining infrastructure and dealing with updates. Not so with cloud computing platforms. Cloud computing platforms also have fewer hidden costs. A fully-loaded, five-year total cost of ownership (TCO) study for a 50-seat project considered several often hidden cost factors, ranging from needs analyses to internal downtime. This study showed the TCO of a premise-based solution to be 2.5 times as high as a cloud computing solution.
• Upgrades are a cinch with cloud computing. Customers running applications on cloud computing platforms benefit from instant deployment of new versions, which means everyone is always on the latest version. Since customizations and integrations are maintained through upgrades, change management discussions can focus on taking immediate advantage of the new 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-time focus on service delivery, the Force.com platform as a service can provide higher service levels than the most companies can achieve on their own. We use the best technologies, policies, and procedures to ensure security at the facilities, application, and network level; to ensure maximum uptime and continuous availability; and to provide a performance record we’re proud of. See for yourself: http://trust.salesforce.com.
• Cloud computing is much more scalable. Successful businesses are continually changing and growing: adding employees, processing more transactions, launching new products and services, and completing mergers and acquisitions. These and any number of other events can dramatically and suddenly alter 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 messy system replacements and data migrations. 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 your changing business.
• Customization is greatly simplified with cloud computing platforms. Users of on-premise applications have no choice but to wait weeks or months for even minor modifications. The Force.com platform as a service was designed from the beginning to make performing basic customizations to the user interface and underlying data objects easy, so that even business users could customize in minutes, without programming. Without the burden of fulfilling constant requests for minor customizations, IT is free to concentrate on performing more advanced customizations, such as associating specific behavior with objects that can be triggered by a wide range of system events.
• Cloud computing is easier on administrators. With the Force.com platform as a service and Salesforce CRM software and a service, administrators can tailor processes and define how data is viewed for different departments and work groups, while ensuring that users can access only that data for which they are authorized.
• True value and innovation is nurtured in cloud computing platforms. By eliminating many of the problems related to traditional application development, the cloud computing model frees developers to focus on developing solutions that deliver real business value. Salesforce.com supports developers with a host of tools and resources—including a point-and-click customization tool, toolkits for the most popular development environments, and the Force.com programming language—Apex Code—as well as developer.force.com. The Force.com community has grown rapidly, resulting in hundreds of innovative platform as a service solutions that are made available 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

The platform as a service from salesforce.com, Force.com, is not only the technology that powers Salesforce CRM applications, it’s the fastest way to build and deploy other enterprise applications. What used to take months can now be done in days or weeks, thanks to the cloud computing platform model. Unlike a stack of separately designed hardware and software products, Force.com speeds innovation through a powerful yet easy-to-use cloud computing development model. Assemble applications with clicks, components and code, then instantly deploy them to salesforce.com’s platform as a service.

"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 the endless infrastructure maintenance, upgrade, and scaling burden. Which 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, but also a marketing and distribution channel (the Force.com AppExchange marketplace) that puts the products ISVs develop on the Force.com cloud computing platform in front of a highly qualified set of businesses seeking cloud computing solutions.

Cloud-Based Application Development: Platform Advantages for Developers

Experienced developers may feel some natural skepticism about the heroic claims made for the Force.com cloud platform. They may wonder how a serious application development platform can let you do so much with just clicks and components. Can you really get such rich functionality without any code at all? The answer is yes, and it comes down to the single word at the heart of Force.com: metadata.

• Metadata: the key to the Force.com application development platform. To venture down into “developer speak”: When you shape Force.com’s built-in functionality, you are actually creating metadata, which the platform uses to dictate the runtime operations of your application. Just as a database schema imposes specific rules on data that can be stored in a database table, Force.com metadata guides the execution of all applications built on the platform.
• Unprecedented development speed. Because your metadata essentially creates and controls your applications, you can immediately see the outcome of your development efforts. This visibility isn’t possible with conventional application development platforms. But when you modify the Force.com metadata for your application, you actually alter its runtime behavior. To see the effects of your changes, you simply open the application. The net result is nothing short of game-changing: With Force.com, you can develop and test with ease and speed that conventional application development platforms can’t match.
• The power of unlimited innovation. The Force.com application development platform doesn’t just offer deep and rich capabilities—it also lets you radically extend them. Using the Java-like Force.com code (Apex), you can transparently supplement platform functionality. And the Force.com pages (Visualforce) framework gives you the freedom to design and build any kind of interface and user interaction. You can modify the standard Force.com interface or substitute one of your own with a unique set of interactions.