Page 1 of 2
Salesforce.com at Dreamforce 2011 gave its major cloud platforms a social boost Thursday, adding a host of new capabilities to Force.com, Database.com and Heroku to give developers foothold into the social enterprise through mobile, cloud and social development.
"This social revolution is going to require a new platform," Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said during his Dreamforce 2011 second day keynote. Benioff said the success of Facebook isn't just in status updates, it's in the platform, it's in the applications on top of Facebook. Same goes for tablets and smartphones, which have become havens for applications and app developers.
Salesforce said that developers have already built more than 400,000 next-generation applications using the company's trio of development platforms. Force.com has also been used to build and deploy more than 240,000 custom applications and delivers more than 500 million transactions each day.
Benioff said a next-generation platform is a new requirement for developers to create social, mobile, real-time and open apps that can be written once and deployed anywhere.
"We've got to let go of the old way. We've got to let go of the old databases. We've got to let go of the old application servers," Benioff said.
And Salesforce is now calling Salesforce's three platforms the Social Enterprise Platform which targets the three key components of the social enterprise: developing social customer profiles, creating employee social networks and building customer social networks and product social networks. According to Salesforce, the Social Enterprise Platform offers a real-time multitenant application development environment that enables the creation of cloud, mobile and social apps.
The platform updates come at a time when Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is expected to be a new cloud battleground and Forrester Research estimates the PaaS market will near $12 billion come 2020.
First, targeting the development of social customer profiles, Salesforce's Database.com, Salesforce's on-demand cloud database for developers, is now generally available to developers and ISVs. Database.com enables secure sharing and social APIs. Database.com is also open, letting developers pick their language, whether Java, C#, Ruby or PHP; platform like Force.com, Heroku or Amazon EC2; and the device, whether written to Google Android, Apple iOS or others.
According to George Hu, Salesforce executive vice president of platforms, marketing and operations, Database.com gained traction immediately upon being launched into general availability.
"In just the first 12 hours since Database.com has been generally available, we had 1,000 databases provisioned," Hu said.
Hu said Database.com is free for up to 100,000 records, 50,000 transactions per month and support for up to three enterprise users. After that, Database.com costs $10 per additionally 100,000 records per month; $10 per 150,000 transactions; $10 per enterprise user; and $10 per 100 light users.
Next: Salesforce Updates Force.com; Heroku For The Enterprise
