October 25th, 2007
On the bleeding edge of platform-as-a-service
At April’s SaaScon show, Salesforce.com’s head of platform development Steve Fisher demonstrated a vacation booking application he’d built with a colleague in a weekend using the (since renamed as) Force.com platform. As with all demonstrations, of course, what made it all look so easy was the preparation that had gone in beforehand: “it took eight years before we were ready to do that,” he told me when we met this week.
There are still some important kinks to iron out (more on those in a moment) before Force.com finally delivers on the grand vision that Steve’s team adopted a couple of years ago. But he’s confident that the eight years of development experience that’s gone into it will keep it ahead of any competition.
“It’s actually quite tough to build a secure, multi-tenant, on-demand application that’s customizable and integratable,” he explained. “Our goal as a platform was to make it so that it was easy.”
What makes that goal particularly ambitious is its scope. This is not about giving developers the ability to elaborate their own variations on top of Salesforce.com’s existing application (which is the approach NetSuite is taking with its new SuiteBundler proposition — more on that in a separate post later this week). Force.com is intended to be a generic platform capable of supporting any conceivable enterprise application.
The vision hasn’t always been so all-encompassing. The turning point came a couple of years ago when what was then called the AppExchange platform was still in its early days. At that stage, the objective had simply been to enable customers and partners to customize the Salesforce.com application and extend it with mashups. There was no firm plan to extend the core application platform beyond its forms-driven database model. Two events changed that.
The first was an attempt to use the new AppExchange platform to write a quote application — which unsurprisingly with a sales automation product had always been a frequent request. The project hit a brick wall: “We did not have transactional integrity,” said Fisher. “That’s when we had to decide, do we become a platform that we could use [for all forms of app] or were we going to be a mashup platform and a database-forms application platform.”
The other stimulus was the sheer creativity that AppExchange, even in its early form, began to unleash among partners — for example an application to manage Google keyword ad campaigns that a four-person startup called Kieden created in a matter of weeks (Salesforce.com subsequently bought the company). “That was a lightbulb moment for me when I saw the Kieden application,” said Fisher.
The quote application had shown the need to move beyond the forms-and-database paradigm. Companies like Kieden showed the opportunity that might reward the effort. That sealed the decision to move ahead with creating the Apex programming language and reforging the platform to support whatever kinds of applications people wanted to build. “We made the decision we’d be a platform that enterprise developers would really want to build on,” said Fisher.
The intention is to provide a platform that takes out all the “grunt work” of building an on-demand enterprise application — in effect productizing what Salesforce.com has learnt from developing its own applications — and thus shorten the development cycle for ISVs building new on-demand applications by a factor of years.
“We hope that the trailblazers will have an advantage,” said Fisher, while admitting the first wave of early adopters — such as UK-based accounting ISV Coda — have had to contend with a beta platform that doesn’t yet solve every challenge. “There’s always a risk and a benefit in being the first.”
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Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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