Dreamforce: Salesforce Tools Emerge From Its Own CloudDreamforce: Salesforce Tools Emerge From Its Own Cloud

Once considered the poster child for software as a service, Salesforce.com is now lifting its "No Software" vision into the clouds.

"Some tasks want massive computing power," said Parker Harris, executive VP of technology at Salesforce.com during the company's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco Tuesday. And if some of those tasks happen to be located on the Salesforce.com platform, Salesforce wants to give them a chance to be executed in Amazon's compute cloud.

Salesforce now sees itself as cloud computing vendor instead of an online applications supplier. It users in effect are tapping into a cloud when they run their applications from two U.S. data centers over the Internet, with one soon to open in Singapore. Those three centers will be followed by one in Europe and another in Japan. From this computing resource base, Salesforce is offering to let its customers build and run applications on its platform, customize their standard Salesforce applications, launch Web sites and tap into other cloud services.

"There's never been a better time for cloud computing," said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com at a press briefing at the Intercontinental Hotel after the opening of Dreamforce user group conference in San Francisco yesterday. Despite the economic downturn, "I've been very optimistic this entire year. We haven't made any changes to our plans," he said.

Tasks that need massive computing power can be exported to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2, where they can executed as an Amazon Machine Image, or set of virtualized files ready to run in the EC2's virtual machines. In its first appearance, the Force.com Tools for EC2 only allow the developer to use PHP, giving him an AMI template that the developer fleshes out, and then ships off to do database number crunching or other functions in the Amazon cloud.

The PHP tool for EC2 is available for free download from http://developer.force.com. Harris, when asked why PHP was the first choice, at first seemed puzzled, because several different languages can be used on the Force.com platform. PHP is one of the most popular, he concluded, so that's where his team chooses to launch its support EC2 services. But others, including Ruby on Rails and Java, are sure to follow in short order, he said.

As additional toolkits emerge for interoperating with the Amazon cloud, they will collectively be known as Force.com Toolkit for Amazon Web Services, Harris said.

"Imagine a Force.com (the Salesforce development platform) application that needs to do massive number crunching. That's where Amazon comes in," he explained in an interview.

The ability to link the Force.com platform and Amazon cloud services is the start of a relationship.

"We're doing something interesting and that prompts more conversation" on what the two parties will be able to do together, according to an Amazon spokesmen. Amazon has been growing its "cloud" computing services, with about half of its data center bandwidth now dedicated to delivering such services as well as hosting its own book and other retail sites.

In addition, Salesforce is providing its customers with toolkits that tap into the Amazon cloud services. "We can extend our storage layer to tap into the Amazon Simple Storage Service," said Harris, the slender figure and technology brains behind Salesforce. With Benioff and others, he is co-founder of the firm. On stage at Dreamforce, he was often overshadowed by Benioff's salesmanship and ongoing narrative, fighting to get in a few comments from the margin.

The Force.com Toolkit for S3 allows a Salesforce application, written in Salesforce's Java-like Apex language, to invoke the API for Amazon S3 and send its data into the Amazon cloud, as if it were a storage service native to the Salesforce platform. The Dreamforce event was also marked by Salesforce announcing it will host its customers' Web sites, built out of Salesforce applications and components, from Salesforce data centers.

"With Force.com Sites, customers can run their Web sites in our cloud," said Benioff in an opening keynote yesterday.

The Sites building capabilities are now available only in developer preview, with full scale delivery slated for sometime in 2009, Harris said. "You can do a lot with our (applications and) services without writing a line of code." Salesforce offer its customers Visual Force, a graphical user interface development environment, the Apex programming language and a "clicks and components" development environment where parts of an application can be assembled without writing code.

Use of Force.com Sites will eventually be priced according to the traffic that a customer's site attracts. The Group Edition of Sites may host up 50,000 page views a month; the Professional Edition, up to 250,000 page views; Enterprise Edition, 500,000 page views and Unlimited Edition, 1 million page views. No specific pricing for the different editions has been announced at this point.

To further understand how Salesforce.com, Amazon, and other companies large and small are approaching cloud computing, information has published an independent report on the subject. Download the report here (registration required).