October 25th, 2007
On the bleeding edge of platform-as-a-service
Salesforce.com is also using the Force.com platform and VisualForce development tool for its own internal development, such as the new AppStore through which customers will be able to buy AppExchange applications, the Wealth Management Edition built for Merrill Lynch and the AppSpace customer portal. Fisher told me it was a high priority to move a large proportion of development to the platform. “That is the way we see we’re going to parallelize our development and deliver value more quickly.”
The team has encountered a couple of major obstacles along the way that they’re currently working to resolve. One of the most important is to remake admin functions originally designed to support a single application that now have to support multiple apps. For example, each user created in Salesforce.com has a single global profile — but the privileges you’d assign to a user in a salesforce automation application probably aren’t the same as those you’d assign to that user in the payroll app or a product development app. So the platform has to accommodate the ability to support application-specific user profiles.
“The administrative side of managing multiple applications is clunkier than it ought to be and we’re working on that,” admitted Fisher. Salesforce has a keen self-interest in fixing this, he added, with forty applications in use internally on the platform: “That’s a challenge.”
Another challenge is in the area of collaborative development — allowing individual developers to ‘check out’ specific parts of an application to work on while colleagues work on other aspects. “We have a sandbox but it’s a little clunky right now. So we’re working on that,” said Fisher. The aim is to allow developers to check out XML metadata files that govern certain workflow or configuration elements of an application and manipulate it externally before checking the revised metadata back in for testing.
Fisher said these two items should be ready next year to coincide with the production release of the new visual development tool announced last month. “By the time VisualForce is available, all these other things should be in place,” he said.
That’s when Salesforce.com will begin to find out whether its ambitious bet on ‘platform-as-a-service’ has paid off. It seems the release of VisualForce has really fired up developers. More people tried it in the first month than tried the Apex programming language in the prior nine months of its availability. And it’s been surprising to see a number of companies — some startups, some established ISVs — plunging into substantial development projects on the platform. With several key elements still to fix, those early experimenters are having to tiptoe along the bleeding edge of platform-as-a-service. But it’s evident that Salesforce.com is putting a lot of effort into getting it right — not only to create a viable platform for partners but also to boost its own internal development capabilities. Even if its partners fail, it will still gain the benefit for itself. If they succeed, then the entire ballgame changes for Salesforce.com, transforming it from a single enterprise application company into the platform for an entire new generation of enteprise application providers.
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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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