Salesforce.com Wants to Host Your Web Site
Salesforce.com is getting into the Web site hosting business, the latest sign that the companys ambitions reach beyond the sales-automation software its named for.
Salesforce.com, whose annual conference gets under way in San Francisco Monday, is the poster child for online software. Businesses access data stored in Salesforce.com over the Internet through a Web browser instead of on tech equipment that they buy and operate. Whereas traditional software requires an upfront fee, Salesforce.com charges its customers a monthly subscription.
Lately, Salesforce.com has been moving beyond sales automation. It now lets outside developers write software that can be accessed online through Salesforce.com. It calls this the Force.com platform, and it is an increasingly important part of the companys strategy. Sales automation, while important, is not the most critical piece of software a business runs. Salesforce.com hopes to make itself indispensable by getting customers to use more and more of its services.
We want to get a better footprint within an enterprise, Bruce Francis, Salesforce.coms vice president of corporate strategy, tells the Business Technology Blog.
The Web site hosting, which the company plans to announce Monday, is a continuation of that strategy.
This isnt your run of the mill Web-site support, however. The goal is to bridge the divide that exists in many businesses between Web operations and internal information technology, says Francis. Not only are the two often run by different groups, but more importantly data doesnt always move freely between the Web site and a businesss systems.
Data entered into sites hosted by Salesforce.com are fed into a businesss other systems provided, of course, that those other systems are from Salesforce.com. So, for example, information submitted by someone applying for a job through a businesss Web site would automatically appear in a candidate-tracking system and the proper people would be notified that new information was there. Similarly, someone could change information in the system, moving the location for the job or adding a new requirement for example, and the change would automatically appear on the Web site. Its possible for businesses to do this today, but it requires special integration technology, not to mention getting the Web group and IT to work together.
The hosting service will be available in 2009 and costs around $1,000 a month for up to 1,000,000 page views.
-Ben Worthen
Image: Nickgraywfu via Flickr
Source: WSJ.com: Business Technology