Interview: Salesforce.com adopts Amazon.com, eBay model

Salesforce.com this month will make available the latest version of its hosted CRM application and developer platform, Sforce 2.0. Touting Sforce as a hosted application server marks a significant shift in the company's value proposition. As Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff explained in an interview with InfoWorldExecutive News Editor Mark Jones at the company's inaugural Dreamforce User Conference last week, the company can now host any enterprise application. 

InfoWorld: What is your vision for Sforce?

Benioff: Our customers have had the kind of psychology that Salesforce.com was not easily customizable, integrateable. But that isn’t true, we were a lot more customizable and a lot more integrateable because we were already starting to implement these APIs. We had an XML interface. When it was clear to us that we had an architectural advantage but we were not articulating it, we said "what we need to do is a) invest more in the Web service protocols and XML interfaces, SOAP interfaces, WSDL; and b) start working with companies to provide the tools so that our customers can customize and integrate." We got ready to announce this as a separate initiative and we gave it a name, Sforce. As a developer platform for customizing and integrating Salesforce.com, we recognized it really could be used for more than just Salesforce.com, it could be used for other applications also. And that became the second part of it.  That is when we said "we need to really let people know we have this whole platform that you can use: a database, a document server, an operating system, an application server, all these various things, but it’s all online, it’s all on demand." It’s a fantastic alternative to the traditional on-premise server.

InfoWorld: Was this always your plan when you first started Salesforce.com?

Benioff: It wasn’t really always in our plan [but] we always knew it was an option. It just became really clear this would be an exciting opportunity. We didn’t know in 1999 the way Web services were going. But much in the same way that Amazon has become a platform for companies to do e-commerce -- you can build a Web site, the front end is Amazon, you don’t know you’re using Amazon -- also you can do that with Salesforce. That is what is exciting about Sforce.  You can integrate Salesforce.com between Salesforce and Oracle, SAP -- or whatever your internal or external system is, or Amazon itself -- and you can customize, you can build new forms, whatever. But now you could also do that independently. We took it to another level with Sforce-to-go in basically three areas. One, custom objects: Now, not only can you use our existing tables but you can create your own tables. That’s exciting for database developers. We gave them also a query language based on our objects in our database. It’s object query language.  And we also gave them this concept of an S-controller, an Sforce control, which is the ability to store their code in our server and then we call it on demand when they want it and run it inside Salesforce.com. That is, they can really modify our screens using a lot of different types of code, and that was a huge breakthrough for us.

InfoWorld: How significant do you think Sforce will be in the context of what you perceive to be Salesforce.com’s core business?