Can Salesforce.com Expand To A Web Services Platform?

At Salesforce.com's first-ever Dreamforce user conference, Benioff said that sforce 2.0 and its tight link to Salesforce.com Winter '04--a new edition of the company's namesake service that will be available in two weeks--extend sforce's capabilities beyond merely adding enhancements and customizations to Salesforce.com.

In fact, by using both services together, developers can host and store code for new applications, which then can be deployed and managed through the Salesforce.com service, Benioff said.

"You can write entirely new applications--things that aren't related to CRM, [using sforce and Salesforce.com]," Benioff said. The combined services "will act as your server to manage your information," he said.

But analysts said they're not so sure Benioff's vision will fly with customers beyond those that want to use Sforce to extend their existing Salesforce.com CRM service.

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"While sforce provides a good platform for creating customized versions of salesforce.com, its applicability as a platform for other forms of application development remains to be proven," said John Meyer, an analyst at Forrester Research.

in addition, sforce is a hosted service and not a piece of software, which might stymie its adoption as a broader platform because companies like to control their IT development in-house, he said.

Meyer said Borland Software tried a similar tack several years ago by offering to provide hosted developer collaboration services. However, the company soon dropped the plan because while customers wanted to use Borland's tools, they wanted to host the developer collaboration internally, he said.

The nature of Salesforce.com's customer base also may hinder the development of new, custom applications on sforce, said Scott Tiazkun, research manager at research firm IDC.

Tiazkun said it's unlikely that typical Salesforce.com customers--small to midsize companies that don't want to make a large investment in their own CRM or IT infrastructure--would be interested in doing much custom application development.

"You have to look at Salesforce.com's customer base," Tiazkun said. "Many of them would want to use this because they can't afford anything better. ... You need a critical mass of developers and users to pull this off. So consider the customer base and how many developers they will need to make this full-bodied."

Peter Gassner, senior vice president and general manager of sforce at Salesforce.com, said company executives certainly aren't naive enough to think developers will drop popular development platforms such as Microsoft, BEA Systems, IBM WebSphere and Borland's host of developer tools and use Salesforce.com services instead.

"We're not about to say there will be one way [to develop applications] and it's our way," he said.

However, Gassner said if customers don't want the hassle of provisioning servers and installing software but still want to deploy secure Web services, using Salesforce.com and sforce is one way to do it.

In that sense, the same customers who abandoned buying CRM applications from Siebel or PeopleSoft in favor of using the Salesforce.com service likely will be the early adopters of building new applications with sforce, Gassner said.

"The same reasons why people use our CRM service are the same reasons why they would use sforce," Gassner said. "Before [Salesforce.com], there was nobody doing CRM on demand. Now there is nobody doing applications on demand, but [we offer this with our sforce] service."

The key features in sforce 2.0 that allow for broader application development are a new Web services API that enable companies to expose their workflows and other business processes in a customized way through Web services definition language (WSDL).

Sforce 2.0 also allows developers to build custom objects and Web interfaces as well as deliver custom databases online, other ways applications can be developed "on demand," Benioff said.

Salesforce.com's agnostic view on what development language is used to build applications using sforce also lends itself to using the service as a broader platform for delivering applications online, he said.

Sforce supports both .Net controls and JavaScript and can be extended through both third-party tools for both environments.

"If you love Java or .Net, we don't care, we love you," Benioff said.

True to this notion, Salesforce gave stage time to several key ISVs partners, including BEA Systems, Borland Software and Microsoft, to show how their software can be integrated with sforce to extend development on the platform.

IDC's Tiazkun said that this boost from its software partners might help Salesforce.com build out a developer community around sforce by "coattailing" on existing development communities for its partners' products.

Still, he remained skeptical that sforce will ever be a viable platform for doing anything more than adding features to the Salesforce.com service. "Wish them luck," Tiazkun said of the company's broader vision for sforce.