Salesforce Lightning Platform

2014. Salesforce ahead of Microsoft and Google on the Enterprise PaaS market



Analytical company Gartner published the new Magic Quadrant for aPaaS providers. What is aPaaS? It's the PaaS platform for Enterprise. I.e. these are cloud services for building and running business applications (but not games and social things). So, the first place on this market (with the big advantage) is taken by Salesforce with its platforms Force.com (now called Salesforce1 Platform) and Heroku. The second place goes to ... Microsoft with its Windows Azure. And the third place is occupied by Google with its Google App Engine. Other participants are crowded behind these three giants. Surprising is the absence of Amazon, which equipped its platform with PaaS tools for simple hosting of business applications.


2010. Force.com 2 - already 5 PaaS platfroms



At the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce demonstrated one more time that now it's not so interested in CRM (it was mainly a subject for jokes) as in cloud platforms. Following the release of SaaS database Database.com, the company introduced another big Force.com feature - Heroku - the PaaS startup that Salesforce has recently acquired for $ 212 million. Heroku - is a cloud platform for developing and hosting Ruby-applications (Ruby - is a popular framework for developing Web apps, created by 37Signals). Heroku became one of the five PaaS-services included in the new version Force.com 2. And the new structure of the Force.com platform now looks like this: ***


2010. Salesforce unveiled SaaS database - Database.com



It seems that Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, was thinking for a long time about how to outdo his "friend" Larry Ellison and prove to him that Cloud Computing - is not a vaporware. And he invented a cloud database that will run as a SaaS service without any software and hardware. After all, Oracle is now virtually a monopolist in the database market (after the SUN/MySQL acquisition) and if it will work, it's the best way to hurt Larry. For greater effect, Benioff has bought an ideal domain Database.com. And today at Dreamforce conference Mark presented the new service. Database.com allows to create reliable, scalable databases using the visual interface and access them from any mobile / web / desktop application via API-interfaces (SOAP and REST). It allows to store any type of content (including documents, pictures, video), supports the SQL query language and provides many additional bells and whistles, like push-update data from the database to application, user management and user authentication. ***


2010. VMForce.com - cloud Java platform by Salesforce and VMWare



Salesforce and Google are becoming less friends but more rivals. Following the start of the cold war between ChatterExchange and Google Apps Marketplace, the companies will soon compete on the cloud platforms market. Today, Salesforce and VMWare introduced the joint product - VMForce.com - the cloud platform for Java applications, which will compete with Google App Engine. Moreover, compared to VMForce.com, GAE would look like a toy. VMForce.com (theoretically) is the ideal solution for companies using (or developing) Java-applications. On the one hand it's the Force.com's infrastructure, which provides reliable, secure and scalable hosting, database, authentication, interface builder (Visualforce), business process designer, mobile access, integrated collaboration system (Chatter). On the other hand - it's the VMWare's ecosystem for Java applications: open-source Java Springs Framework and the runtime platform vCloud. ***