Three’s a Cloud for Salesforce.com, Facebook and Amazon.com
The clouds are aligning: Salesforce.com Monday unveiled plans to make its cloud work with Facebooks and Amazons.
Cloud computing is the hottest tech buzzterm since Web 2.0. Its come to mean more or less anything having to do with the Internet: A service from Amazon.com that rents out its excess computing power is cloud computing; so is Facebooks social-networking Web site.
But the company that has embraced the term most passionately is Salesforce.com, which broadened the meaning to include all software accessed over the Internet. (Complicating matters, from a jargon perspective at least, is that each of these companies lets outside developers write software that runs on its cloud, meaning that they also call themselves platforms.)
Salesforce.coms Dreamforce conference, which is taking place this week in San Francisco, was dubbed by one speaker the Woodstock of cloud computing. Salesforce.com hired people wearing puffy-white jackets to stand outside the conference center holding giant helium-filled cloud balloons and pumped mist into the hall where CEO Marc Benioff gave his keynote. Youll never guess what Rolling Stones song was playing.
The partnerships Benioff announced Monday broke the record for the most times the words cloud and platform were used in a single presentation. But once you cut past the hype theres something pretty interesting taking place. Businesses that write software that runs on Salesforce.coms platform can now have the same software run on Facebook. And they can use Amazons services to support this software.
What that means is that a businesses that develops a tool meant to engage customers, say something that solicits new product ideas, no longer has to wait for its customers to visit its Web sites. It can take the tool to Facebook and have the 120 million people with accounts on that site spread it around there. In addition to more visitors, Facebook gets an in with corporations, which should help Facebook make money someday, maybe.
-Ben Worthen
Source: WSJ.com: Business Technology