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Platform-as-a-Service Depends on Integrations


Salesforce's new platform raises questions about coupling services

By Alex Handy
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October 8, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
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.




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