Salesforce.com has been a leader in cloud computing since its inception. Although launched as on demand CRM solution other SaaS applications have always been part of the vision. You only have to see the No Software logo to realise that.
Two years ago Salesforce launched the Force platform and more recently VisualForce to enable third party developers to deploy applications on the Salesforce.com cloud platform.At the recent Dreamforce conference more announcements , such as Sites, were made which demonstrate the Commitment of salesforce.com to this goal.
Other bigger players are now beginning to show their hand: Google has had its app engine around since 2007 and Amazon is pushing its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and most recently Microsoft announced Azure.
Who will win? Well without doubt Salesforce.com offers the best technical solution because its multi-tenant database scales so much more easily than the other solutions but its achiles heel is its reluctance to fully embrace a VAR model. With Amazon a vendor can buy the service embed his application and resell it and of course Microsoft have well established reseller channels.
Salesforce have taken the first steps along the VAR route by offering an embedded licence but this only applies to a single app. If a vendor wants to integrate other third party apps to provide a complete solution then the customer must buy a platform licence from Salesforce.
Its early days and this is very much an evolving situation. Its easy to see that Salesforce.com does not want to risk cannabalising its revenues streams and changing from a culture of centralised control to decentralised management is a challenge but if it wants to compete with the other vendors who are looking to park their tanks on the Salesforce cloud computing lawn, it will need to unleash its own attack dogs.
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