Just as cloud-based Salesforce CRM has become the leading CRM solution, the application development world is beating a path to the Force.com platform. With its unlimited power to innovate, Force.com is revolutionising custom application development, making it possible to quickly create robust, enterprise-class solutions for almost any business need.

Enterprise Application Development Old and New

• The old way: slow and inefficient application-building Over the years, the traditional way of creating and running business applications has become overly complex and cumbersome. There are simply too many moving parts to buy, install, configure, and maintain—including hardware and software. Plus, the entire infrastructure requires constant maintenance to keep it working smoothly.
  This overhead burden sets up barriers to productivity in custom application development. Every little change in a complex computer environment triggers repercussions throughout the organisation, a set up which significantly reduces overall IT responsiveness, impairing the ability of a company to address constantly changing business needs. Instead, enterprise application development moves at a glacial pace, with long backlogs a fact of life. The end result? Business managers struggle along without the applications they need to run their business, and muddle through with unintegrated, homegrown systems on spreadsheets, personal databases, or other unsupported platforms.
• The new deal: application development productivity in the cloud. Enter cloud computing and salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. Application development takes place—and all applications run—entirely on the Web. All you need to access them is a Web browser.
  With just an Internet connection, your developers gain access to an application development environment with all the tools and resources they need. This way, they can develop complete enterprise applications without the cost and complexity of buying and maintaining an on-premises development infrastructure.
• IT that delivers more business value. Equally important is the impact of Force.com on the responsiveness of your IT systems. You can add developers instantly, anywhere in the world, with full access to application development resources. And they can quickly build and deploy solutions, reducing application development cycle time, speeding the response to user requests, and delivering the IT agility required to take advantage of fast-breaking business opportunities.

Custom Application Development with Force.com

Force.com offers an extremely powerful, scalable, and secure platform for application development. It delivers a complete technology stack covering the ground from database and security to workflow and user interface—so you can focus on assembling, building, and instantly deploying solutions. As a result, custom application development is possible without the headaches and expense of buying, configuring, and managing development hardware and software.

Unlike separately designed hardware and software products, Force.com speeds innovation through a powerful yet easy-to-use application development and deployment model. You can easily develop and then immediately deploy your solutions to the Force.com cloud-based infrastructure.

Force.com lets you implement business logic with workflow rules, approval processes, and custom code. You can store structured data, support Web browsers and mobile devices, integrate with other applications, do reporting and analytics, and scale up or down—all with the sub-second response time, high availability, and security you need to run your business applications.

Custom Application Development: Build and Run Your Entire Business in the Cloud

The Force.com platform is the fastest path to complex enterprise application development. What used to take months can now be done in days or weeks. Companies and ISVs are using Force.com to build applications across the entire spectrum of business functions and industries: supply chain management, billing, audit, tax calculation, event management, compliance tracking, brand management, pricing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, billing, HR, payment processing, employee on-boarding, claims processing, and much more.

There are more than 100,000 custom applications running on Force.com, and the platform supports more than 150 million transactions per day.

Enterprise Application Development Made Easy

Traditional custom application development platforms supply only the core services of database access and containers for logic and presentation. You need other software to create your entire application as well as additional components to run the data centre that supports the platform.

And more components means additional expenditure for acquisition, maintenance, and integration. With Force.com, you get a full enterprise application development stack—including a complete user interface to your data, comprehensive reporting and analytic capabilities, a flexible security and sharing model, and workflow and approvals. All this functionality is available and integrated from the outset. You can even leverage extended features such as built-in internationalisation, full support for mobile devices, and integration with existing systems.

Access to Force.com is through a Web browser, and both development and deployment take place in the cloud. The platform itself provides everything you need for robust enterprise application development through a combination of clicks, components, and code. This unique blend makes developers much more productive. Application capabilities come from simple declarations of attributes through pre-built capabilities and extend to a fully flexible application development environment.

With simple clicks, Force.com lets you include rich functionality in all your applications. You can define your data structures and relationships, expose user interfaces to interact with this data, extend internal data with logical representations, and define workflow actions and approval processes. It’s simply a matter of shaping the built-in capabilities of the platform to your needs by setting the values of attributes.

There’s one more application development advantage too. The entire Force.com reporting and analytics system is automatically built into all your applications, giving you integrated functionality that lets you mine your data store for additional value.