SaaS Featured Article

I caught Salesforce.com (News - Alert) (News - Alert) on a recent stop on their ‘Tour de Force’ world tour. The road show is truly global, with venues as diverse as San Francisco, NY, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Toronto on this side of the world, as well as Dublin, Paris, Munich, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and Bangalore.

I heard Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff (News - Alert) (News - Alert) present his vision for the industry and he explained his company’s role as a driver, catalyst and evangelist for SAAS (software as a service).

"We’re moving into a new world that looks a lot like the consumer Internet companies," he said, "a new world of software as a service."

Benioff discussed a new architecture for how to build a software environment and how to deliver it to customers.

One of the hot topics of the day was multi-tenancy, which can serve as an enabler, allowing for faster vendor innovation, economies of scale, scalability, automatic upgrades, and more.

Multi-tenancy serves companies of all sizes, bringing the industry together, with the ability to share best practices across companies, regardless of how large or small they are.

And that’s a diverse audience that Salesforce.com is only to happy to serve, and serve effectively.

Benioff told the crowd that Salesforce.com works with thousands of small businesses and yet won several large CRM deals in the past year.

"Software as a shared architecture has similarities to the utility companies," Benioff said. "This hotel," he said, speaking of the Westin in Boston’s Back Bay, the location of the conference, "did not drill its own well, or deploy its own power plant to deliver the water and electricity to its guests."

It’s clear Benioff wants his company to lead the charge into a world where software and the applications it can enable, are looked upon as a utility, serving all comers from within "the cloud."

And that cloud computing is at the heart of the decision today’s developers face when deciding how best to create their applications.

This bifurcation between software and cloud computing is happening now, and it’s obvious that Salesforce.com is betting on the cloud.

"Where are we going?" Benioff asked the audience. "We’re on our way to becoming the world’s first multiple application and multiple category software as a service company."

Software developers have had it rough and their path has been expensive, complex, and risky, what with the need to develop hardware infrastructure, software infrastructure, technical operations, business operations, etc… to get from ideas to applications. And then, every few revisions it’s time to build that environment all over again.

Benioff believes that cloud computing offers developers a very different approach than the traditional model. Cloud computing offers an alternative whereby developers can leverage the infrastructure of the Internet to in turn take advantage of the work of others to run their applications.

"The Internet means we can leverage each others work," he said. "And, the sharing is key."

It’s happening today, with examples running the gamut from small companies to large, with the likes of Amazon.com (News - Alert), their own Force.com, Google Apps, Facebook (News - Alert), Coghead, Rollbase, Longjump, and many others of various sizes.

The cloud is about empowering developers, by granting them access to unlimited computing power, and the utility of a service.

Benioff pointed out that this gives a wider audience of developers the opportunity to play on a larger stage. "In the emerging world, it [cloud computing] gives developers a chance where they could otherwise not afford to get in the game. This is a big change, allowing developers in Russia or India to take advantage of a fundamental shift."

It’s apparent that Benioff is excited about what he and his colleagues are doing.

"I’m very passionate that this can be the future of our industry," he told the audience. "What will you build?"