Will Marc Benioff's fortune come from the clouds?
Salesforce.com twist to cloud computing dubbed “Force.com Sites” is an interesting one. Although “it’s more of an evolution than a revolution,” confide to me Marc Benioff after his 2 hours long media briefing session.
Indeed, the main difference to earlier announcements made by the San Francisco, Calif.-based company during its latest “Tour de Force“, a few months ago, is that today enterprises can let the general public access their applications written on the company’s Force.com platform.
So far these applications were “internal facing” and restricted to employees, partners or anyone with proper authorisation i.e. a username and a password.
The difference is subtle and does not really merit all the buzz it got though.
Force.com Sites is a cloud for business and enterprise applications. “Those applications that are data centric like form or workflow applications. We also provide services needed by enterprise applications, like a database, a mobile framework, administrative capabilities, etc.,” explains Adam Gross, vice president of platform marketing for Salesforce.com. “You won’t see applications that just need raw compute power like a video streaming service or a photo sharing site on Sites.”
Force.com Sites will most likely host self-service applications that lets consumers enter information onto an enterprise system.”Applications that deal with customers,” adds Gross.
Paying per pages views rather than usage
In another interesting twist, Salesforce.com chose to price its cloud based on the number of pageviews a site will get rather than storage or bandwith. “Customers have no idea of how much bandwith they will use but they understand the notion of page views. That’s why we chose this metric. It’s much easier to grasp,” said Gross.
All Salesforce.com customers will receive a number of “free” page views based on their subscription level; from 50,000 monthly page views for the group edition all the way up to 1 million for the unlimited edition. Additional page views are also available for an extra fee.
