(Image courtesy of SalesForce.com)

At this year's Dreamforce, Salesforce.com made 4 key announcements:

• The Force.com platform - platform as a service for companies to deploy their own apps
• Visualforce - a page based model design tool to deliver any User Interface-as-a-Service
• An AppsExchange milestone- the vendor delivered its 700th live application
• Salesforce Ideas- an online innovation community and support group

Of those announcements, The Force.com had the most impact as it now opened up the platform to not only its own partners, but also any customer who was looking for a SaaS platform to build on. Like the original AppsExchange announcement which targeted partners, the opening up of the platform to customers was equally innovative because it put key SaaS development tools in the hands of innovative customers to build their own "last-mile" solutions. The net:net - the reduction of complicated software development platforms.

The bottom line
SalesForce.com remains innovative in bringing a true solutions centric ecosystem to the end user. Customers today face so much frustration in waiting for a vendor to deliver key functionality. Opening up to partners via AppsExchange was innovative. Sharing the code with customers to develop is brilliant and put SalesForce.com one step ahead of any competitor in giving control back to the customer.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2007 by R Wang. All rights reserved