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HOME >> SPECIAL REPORTS

Cloud providers answer the tough questions

By David Worthington

May 15, 2009 — (Page 1 of 8)
Portability, governance, security and quality of service are concerns of companies considering a move into cloud computing and SaaS. In discussions with SD Times, industry executives met some difficult questions about this emerging paradigm with equally frank answers.

Portability became a reality in on-premises software when Java came onto the scene in 1995: Software could be compiled and run on any platform that was supported by a Java Virtual Machine. With the emergence of cloud computing, some developers fear that their applications could be “locked” into a platform that is beyond their control.

Yet there are two sides to that coin. The massive capital investments Salesforce.com has made in its data centers will not be generating revenue if customers leave, said Peter Coffee, director of platform research for Salesforce. So in that regard, he said, “We are locked into our customers; there is a fundamental shift in the power relationship [in cloud computing].”

Customers maintain a strict control over intellectual property on Force.com, and they may extract their data and a description of any custom logic at any time, he explained. “Information syncs locally at set intervals. The customers define the risk themselves. We don’t have more control than you choose to give us.”

Should a customer choose to leave, he or she may generate reports about application metadata as well as the complete relational structure of their data, Coffee added. Salesforce does not act punitively, but customers will still incur switching and migration costs, he said.

Coffee noted that a developer would have to invest more time to recreate a service’s functionality if a customer was using an “elaborate Force.com” application that implements heavy APEX (Salesforce’s business application programming language). The problem is compounded if the developer uses Salesforce’s Visualforce presentation layer for its user interface, he added.

With AJAX and JavaScript, the UI is portable, said Zach Nies, vice president of engineering at Rally Software, a Salesforce development partner. “You cannot port the UI side if you use [Salesforce’s] Visualforce.”

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, SaaS

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