PAAS

Salesforce Force.com Review

Product Snapshot

Product Pricing

Contact vendor directly for pricing information.

Technology

Product is a cloud platform, meaning that there is no software or hardware to buy and manage, allowing businesses to focus on building powerful apps to improve their processes. Apps are run on a secure service where data is scaled, tuned, and backed up automatically.

Customer Focus

Product is an agile cloud platform suitable for the needs of any sized organization looking to develop apps.

Select Customers

Burberry, Avon, Zimmer, Wrigley, Caesars Entertainment

View Vendor's Product Page

About Force.com

Force.com is a leading cloud platform to build and run custom social, mobile and real-time business apps. Over 240,000 apps have been built using the Force.com platform, including apps for workflow, analytics and other core business processes.

Companies can use this proven cloud platform to automate their processes and reinvent themselves into a social enterprise. More than 97,700 companies, including many industry leaders, trust in this software solution to help them quickly create and deploy applications that are agile, social, and mobile.

About the Company

Salesforce.com is the leading enterprise cloud computing company with a strong focus on the Social Enterprise—infusing a social context into the way businesses are run. Founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com has gained recognition for its innovative products right from the start. Salesforce.com delivers a range of CRM and business applications that help companies improve the way their employees collaborate and the way they connect with customers.

Salesforce.com Acquisition History

Sendia (April 2006) – now Force.com Mobile
Kieden (August 2006) – now Salesforce for Google AdWords
Kenlet (January 2007) – now Salesforce Ideas
Koral (March 2007) – now Salesforce Content
Instranet (August 2008) – now Salesforce Knowledge
GroupSwim (December 2009) – now part of Salesforce Chatter
Informavores (December 2009) – now Visual Workflow
Jigsaw Data Corp. (April 2010) – now Data.com
Sitemasher (June 2010)
Navajo Security (August 2011)
Activa Live Chat (September 2010)
Heroku (December 2010)
Etacts (December 2010)
Dimdim (January 2011)
Manymoon (February 2011)
Radian6 (March 2011)
Assistly (September 21, 2011)
Model Metrics (November 2011)
Rypple (Dec 2011)

Force.com Key Features

Agile

Use minimal coding
Leverage visual tools and a library of components to develop apps in a building-block manner
Use open APIs to integrate apps
Save time on development to solve problems and build your business

Social

Use a secure social network to promote collaboration with colleagues
Use pre-built components and an enterprise framework for profiles, conversations, feeds, file sharing and updates
Integrate with any custom app with REST APIs

Mobile

Use a secure cloud database and APIs to build native mobile apps
Leverage the platform’s UI framework and HTML5 to build mobile-optimized browser apps with one code base
Securely deliver apps on any mobile device

Salesforce.com Force.com Screenshots

Salesforce.com Force.com Videos

Pros

Force.com is built with a broad range of development tools–so many that developers of various skills and skill levels will be able to easily develop a Force.com application with their preferred tools.
Force.com uses its own proprietary development language, called Apex. Though some developers might balk at the idea of learning a new language, Apex is very similar to Java and C# and includes traditional C-style syntax. Apex also works similarly to other database languages like T-SQL and PL/SQL.
If you don’t have the time or resources to write code, designers are available to create an application entirely on the Force.com website.
Force.com applications are easily integrated with other cloud providers, such as Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services, and even with Facebook.

Cons

Some developers and software vendors may not want to commit to a proprietary development environment that does not have the established reputation and maturity as Java/J2EE or Microsoft.NET.
If developing on Force.com, developers may find themselves locked into using Salesforce.com technology since Salesforce.com CRM products do not have cloud portability.

Overall

Force.com offers developers robust cloud infrastructure components that include multi-tenant architecture, scalability and security, along with tools for social media and mobility. With Force.com, Salesforce.com customers can publish to their web site any data or applications that are stored in Force.com, lowering infrastructure costs while optimizing performance. Though some may not want to migrate to Salesforce.com’s proprietary development language, those who are comfortable with this migration may receive benefits such as lowered costs and streamlined IT processes.