Salesforce does SOA

About 700 people crowded into the Santa Clara Marriott last Monday, for the Salesforce Developer Conference. I stayed for the first half of the event, enjoying the opening and keynote speeches, but then bailed after lunch. (The afternoon program consisted of technical sessions on Apex programming, enterprise mashups, and launching a business based on Salesforce.com’s hosted platform.)

What Salesforce has done lately is impressive, no doubt about it: turned the the platform for its hosted CRM software into a multitenant platform for your own enterprise programs. It’s more than just a hosted service, like Google, eBay or Amazon, in that you can truly write your own programs and run them on the hosted environment. It’s also more than a reusable grid, such as the Sun Grid Compute Utility, due to the rich set of services that it provides. (The Sun utility resembles an timeshare batch-processing mainframe, complete with billing by the CPU/hour.)

No, what Salesforce.com has created is unique; at least, I’ve not seen anything like it. Not only that, but it’s also profitable; the company is making money hand over fist. It’s becoming quite aggressive, in fact, is pushing its hosted platform (and its Apex language) to ISVs. Good call. One reason why Microsoft destroyed OS/2 is that Microsoft embraced third-party developers, showering them with love and free goodies, while IBM lurched between exploiting and ignoring them. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has learned that lesson well: Third party developers can be your most fervent evangelists. Every dollar you spend on them will be returned a thousandfold.

There wasn’t much news at the Salesforce Developer Conference, although Benioff kept hinting about a big announcement with Google which was covered in the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle, and in fact, several speakers made in-your-face references to the fact that they couldn’t talk about Google. It was fairly obnoxious. (Benioff also disclosed that there’s a signficant rebranding of Salesforce.com coming soon, as the company seeks to move beyond its CRM origins.)

However, there were some really cool demos, such as one by Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe, showing how to integrate Salesforce.com’s online services into a locally executing online/offline application. This was all based on the forthcoming Apollo platform, which merges Flash and Flex. Very cool, very impressive.

Even more significant, however, was the demonstration of Salesforce SOA, which allows custom-written Apex applications to push and pull Web services, based not only on an enterprise’s publicly exposed services, but also commercial services like those from Amazon, FedEx, Google, and others. (Whoops, we’re not supposed to talk about Google.) Impressive.

While the Salesforce.com platform is technologically impressive, bear in mind that many of the third-party applications as simply single-function add-on buttons to the core CRM software itself. (Not all are, but many are.) In fact, when I asked one successful Salesforce.com ISV whether it would be fair to characterize third-party apps as being akin to Excel macros, he agreed.

Remember, one generally has to be a subscriber to the Salesforce.com service in order to benefit from third party applications hosted on the Salesforce.com platform — just as you need to buy a copy of Excel from Microsoft in order to run an Excel macro.

In April, Salesforce came up with a model where users who don’t use the CRM application could have access to third-party applications. The “Platform Edition” subscription costs only $50 per user per month (with limited access to applications and paid tech support), or $100 per user per month (with unlimited access and free tech support). Plus, of course, the cost for the third-party application. So, while Salesforce.com is innovative, it’s not cheap; those fees add up. But there’s no doubt that it’s innovating — and it’s innovating very quickly.

The highlight of my visit to the Salesforce Developer Conference was a half-hour talk by Guy Kawasaki. I’ll blog about that separately.