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Introduced in 2007, Force.com is salesforce.com’s platform-as-a-service offering. By using Force.com, companies and ISVs can create and run new applications entirely over the Internet, without software. Capable of supporting all kinds of business applications—not just those for the sales, marketing and support departments— Force.com makes the core technologies behind Salesforce CRM available for developing applications that serve all of a company’s departments, employees, and customers.
With Force.com, companies are freed from the burdens of implementing and managing their IT infrastructures for custom applications, and can instead focus their resources on those activities that provide the most business impact. With an estimated eight of every ten dollars spent in “dead money” that doesn’t contribute directly to business change and growth, the PaaS model provides immediate benefits to IT and development organizations of all sizes. And, similar to the utility services provided by power or telephone companies, organizations pay only for those services they successfully deploy and use. As a result, they can eliminate much of the risk that accompanies traditional software-based development platforms.
With Force.com, companies can finally focus on innovation, not infrastructure.
What Will You Build?
The Force.com platform is a rich development environment designed to enable the database applications at the center of most corporate application development projects. With its full stack of database, integration, logic, and user interface capabilities, Force.com can be used in application scenarios that were, until recently, the exclusive domain of traditional client/server and app server database tools, such as Visual Basic, .NET, and Java.
These scenarios span the full range of business use cases, including Intranet-style applications such as employee directory and time-off management apps, departmental or group apps for recruiting, bug tracking, and asset management, as well as apps that extend salesforce.com’s CRM applications, such as professional services project management.
To begin to understand the power of the Force.com platform, it is useful to look at some examples of what our customers have already accomplished. One of the world’s largest media companies, which needed a database application to manage the scheduling of some of its assets, evaluated the capabilities of both Force.com and .NET. Although this team budgeted 3,000 hours for creating and deploying this application in .NET, they completed the app in fewer than 100 hours on Force.com. What’s more, the application developed with Force.com included advanced features such as globalization and international currency conversion, which the .NET implementation lacked.
Another example comes from Electronic Arts (EA), the world’s leading interactive entertainment software company, whose success depends on being able to recruit and retain extremely talented game developers. EA chose Force.com to create a recruiting application to manage its mission-critical talent acquisition activities. Three weeks after they began design, EA rolled out an award-winning system— a success that led EA to create ten additional applications. One of these applications, a vendor management system, was estimated to require 9-12 months to develop. With Force.com, EA deployed the application in six weeks.
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