Salesforce.com wants to host your business applications at Force.com Sites
Salesforce.com wants to make the development of business applications faster and easier with a new service called Force.com Sites, which is available as of today. To sweeten the deal, the San Francisco company is letting businesses build and host their first application for free.
Salesforce is best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) software delivered via online subscription, but it also offers a platform for building business apps called Force.com. Previously, those apps were for internal use only, but it’s important to let customers and others interact with them via a company’s public website. That’s where Force.com Sites comes in — companies can build an application in Force.com then incorporate it into their web sites via Force.com Sites.
For example, NJ Transit built a page where people can request group trips. Salesforce says 85 companies have used Force.com Sites since a preview of the service launched in November, adding up to 38 million page views and more than five terabytes of data served.
Since the development process on Force.com tends to be less intensive than traditional web development, this will hopefully help businesses get their sites up and running — and of course, this makes the Force.com platform much more powerful, since it’s no longer limited to internal apps. I’ve heard some complaints about getting “locked in” to Force.com — i.e., if you build an application on the platform you have to rebuild it if you move somewhere else — but Salesforce’s Ariel Kelman says the company is very interested in portability, making it easy for customers to export their data elsewhere in formats like XML.
To encourage businesses to try out the platform, Force.com Sites includes a free version that’s good for 100 users and 250,000 page views per month. Kelman says most of those companies will probably move up to the paid version pretty quickly, since businesses on Force.com tend to build lots of apps. Force.com Sites is also included as part of the Enterprise and Unlimited editions of Force.com that companies pay for. But past a certain number of page views, those customers will have to pay extra.
Next Story: Real-time collaboration moving too fast? Try Basecamp’s Daily Digest
Previous Story: iPhone game startup Ngmoco hires top Sega executive
About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.