Salesforce.com

As the No. 3 executive at Microsoft, Paul Maritz presided over the company's Windows juggernaut, turned aside threats from Netscape and Sun Microsystems, and pressed the company to embrace the Internet. Now, the longtime software executive is looking down Microsoft's barrel from the other end, trying to help his new employer, VMware, triumph where past Microsoft competitors fell short.

Salesforce.com continued developing as "the enterprise cloud computing company" Monday with announcements that it is extending its Force.com platform to Facebook and Amazon Web Services.

The announcements are part of a series of recent moves that include the unveiling this week of Force.com Sites, enabling businesses to utilize the Force.com platform and applications in the creation of public Web sites.

'Social Meet CRM'

Salesforce.com unveiled Force.com Sites on Monday at its U.S. Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The new tool will enable business customers to integrate Salesforce.com applications into any Web site.

Built on the Force.com platform, the tool will enable businesses to create public Web sites that integrate with -- and utilize data from -- such Salesforce.com applications as customer relationship management, database, work flow, logic, integration, customization and user-interface capabilities. Additionally, businesses can extend data and applications for use on mobile devices.

Looking for growth in new markets where it is increasingly being bypassed, Microsoft plans late next year to begin offering a new "cloud" operating system that would manage the relationship between software inside the computer and on the Web, where data and services are becoming increasingly centralized.

The company needs a new kind of operating system for a new computing world populated not by a single style of desktop computer but instead by dozens of different kinds of Internet-connected appliances ranging from smartphones to mini-laptops called netbooks.

Salesforce.com, based in San Francisco, has acquired its fourth company in the last two years. The provider of customer-service support acquired Instranet, its largest acquisition to date, for $31.5 million in cash, which includes $4.2 million from Instranet's balance sheet. The two companies closed the deal on Aug. 4.

Ever since veteran software entrepreneur Dave Duffield launched his new startup, Workday, a year and a half ago, people have wondered if it could become the next Salesforce.com. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's chief executive, had shaken up the customer-relationship management software world and created a company with a market cap of $8 billion with an online service that replaces expensive and complex traditional software packages. Could Duffield and Workday do the same? Just now, there's growing evidence they can.

At first, just a handful of employees at Sanmina-SCI began using Google Apps for tasks like e-mail, document creation, and appointment scheduling. Now, just six months later, almost 1,000 employees of the electronics manufacturing company go online to use Google Apps in place of the comparable Microsoft tools. "We have project teams working on a global basis and to help them collaborate effectively, we use Google Apps," says Manesh Patel, chief information officer of Sanmina-SCI, a company with $10.7 billion in annual revenue.

More than half of Fortune 500 and other large enterprises expect to spend more than previously or the same on software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for their organization in the future. More than seven out of 10 (73 percent) of the 100 executives interviewed in a survey conducted by Kelton Research stated their enterprise has adopted SaaS or plans to adopt SaaS within the next 18 months.

It was over a year and a half ago when I had a chance to listen to Marc Benioff talk about how his company's software would be integrating with Google to provide a mashup designed to allow companies to better track their Google advertising. Using the services together, organizations would be able to utilize the CRM portion of the software to track where customers came from: which ad, which keyword, which landing page, etc. The matter was so important, I made the article a High Priority! column in the September 2006 issue of [Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine].

Social-networking site Facebook is opening up part of its platform. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said Monday that it will make what it described as "a significant part" of its platform open source.

The platform, one year old last week, has led to the development more than 24,000 applications created by outside developers for its community of users, Facebook said. "We see about 140 applications added to our directory per day," said Facebook's Ami Vora in a posting on the Facebook developers blog.

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