Salesforce.com’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications, Force.com ,has rolled out a new capability, called Force.com Sites, that lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform.
Salesforce says that advantage of Force.com Sites is that companies can quickly deploy, scale and run applications and sites in real-time without having to deal with software or hardware hassles. The new feature lets companies build a database with established privacy settings, create public sites with a variety of programming languages, including HTML, JavaScript Flex and CSS, access analytics, register domains and more.
Salesforce has been testing this in a pilot program for 85 companies, including the American Red Cross, Crocs, Dell, and Starbucks. Sites were built for these enterprises for e-commerce, recruitment, distribution and inventory management, ticketing and scheduling, Facebook apps and social networking. For example, Starbucks recently launched a volunteer site to engage customers in finding volunteer work off of Force.com Sites. The site, which was only built in 4 weeks, has a database of volunteer opportunities around the country.
Salesforce is also announcing a free edition of Force.com, giving small businesses and entrepreneurs a budget friendly way to use Salesforce’s platform. The company originally announced the Force.com Sites capability last winter, signaling Salesforce’s ambitions to expand Force.com’s cloud into hybrid applications that span both internal enterprise customers and the customers of those applications. Not only is the Sites feature a new business channel, but it’s a way to further Salesforce’s presence in the enterprise (which is already significant). And it’s a way to remain competitive in the fast-growing cloud computing space.
It seems like force.com site has a much clearer pricing structure now comparing to few month ago.
Interesting.
The release of 100 user free edition is quite challanging for other competitors of the market. The question is how they are gonna react to this offer and if they will try to tempt users with even more attractive option…
I agree with Jane. Giving away 100 free users seems generous. I guess the limitation of one application may be a problem for some. If you’re going to invest time and effort learning how to develop for force.com you’ll want to use it for more than just a single application and this is undoubtedly what Salesforce are counting on…
I am one of the much smaller competitors that have to figure out how to respond. Luckily we have a little bit of time given that the free offer is not yet available in Australia…
Sebastiaan, just checked out your site and noticed its very similar with PerfectForms.. Do you have any connections or is it just a coincidence?
Hi Jane, well spotted…
No, there’s no coincidence, Novera have an OEM agreement with PerfectForms and we market it in Australia and New Zealand under the BizForms brand. We also provide a localised On-Demand version.
Force.com Sites is really an amazing technology. Check out the first Event Registration system now available on Force.com Sites, from Navatar Group.
http://www.navatarforce.com/financial/world’s-first-online-event-registration-system-on-force-com-sites/
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