Platform-as-a-Service Depends on Integrations

Salesforce's new platform raises questions about coupling services

By Alex Handy

October 8, 2007 —

For platform-as-a-service to work, it all comes down to integrations.

When Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff announced his company's new Force.com platform-as-a-service site in mid-September, his employees spent time assuring that integrations were at the heart of this new platform. But these integrations aren't all coming from Salesforce itself; many of the company's highly touted customer integration projects were completed by third-party developers who now make their living by tying internal and external applications together.

But that's all part of the plan, said Peter Coffee, Salesforce’s director of platform research and former eWeek columnist. He explained that Salesforce offers consumable APIs for developers who wish to write their own integrations, but third-party integration solutions abound. Cast Iron Systems has even developed a network appliance to do the job.

The platform launch was accompanied by the announcement of new application construction tools. At the heart of the Force.com development environment is Salesforce's Apex programming language and its new Visualforce user interface design tool. Apex, which was originally introduced at Salesforce's 2006 Dreamforce convention last fall, creates functional code that in practice works like a stored procedure. These procedures can be coupled together into Web pages using Visualforce. Applications can then be debugged through a new Eclipse plug-in designed to connect to the Force.com system internals.

Salesforce is banking heavily on the new Force.com platform as a new contender in the field of enterprise application platforms, and not just as a new place for startups to build their software. When asked if Salesforce was advocating the removal of customers’ old infrastructure to be replaced by Force.com, Coffee said, “I don't think we would ever tell people that's something they need to do. The entire point of what we've been trying to make clear in the integration area is that it's not an either-or proposition, [but rather] ‘Where's the best place to make that new investment?’”

Denis Pombriant, managing principal at analyst firm Beagle Research and former managing director of the CRM practice at research firm Aberdeen Group, said the Force.com platform-as-a-service is a natural progression from software-as-a-service. “With the introduction of Force.com and some of the other tools we've seen recently, virtually any application you can think of can be built using on-demand development and deployment technology. There are a lot of applications that haven't been [formally] built in an organization, or are [built on] spreadsheets or PC tools. Those tend to be separate from the IT superstructure. Those applications also tend to be maintained at the department level, and if someone leaves or gets hit by a bus, you may not have the wherewithal to maintain that,” said Pombriant.

These applications, he added, are perfect candidates for moving over to the new Force.com platform. Therefore, said Pombriant, Salesforce's new platform isn't just for developers starting from scratch on new applications.

Pombriant expects the most likely customers for Salesforce's new platform to be those that have little time and money to spend on critical application development. When it comes to integrations, he said, these same customers are much more likely to need tailored solutions. “I think there is not one clear path, but there are probably two or three. These paths are very well paved,” said Pombriant. Those paths flow through the Salesforce API, through third-party solutions from companies like Informatica or integrations consultant firm Bluewolf.

When asked if the market was ready for a platform-as-a-service, Pombriant said, “Economics are always going to drive this market. There's a strong demand for it that is more financially and economically responsible to the organization. I think we're probably at a good time for them to begin rolling out this tech. They have some very, very large customers, and those are the people propelling them to build these new tools and services. It's a question of time before the smaller ends of the market embrace it.”

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