Can you tell me a little bit about the Force.com
platform? We're a small business in the beginning stages of evaluating on-demand CRM vendors
and we're wondering what features and functionality the platform would have to offer us that we
couldn't get from vendors like Microsoft and Oracle.
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The Force.com platform has
two important attributes for a small business (there are a couple of other attributes that are
important only for large businesses, but more on that another time). First, the platform provides a
very rich application programming interface (API) for extending Salesforce.com's features and
integrating with external applications. The API is a large set of Web services that
have full "call in" and "call out" capability, with access to 95% of the tables and functions in
the system. Second, the platform is the basis for a very large set of applications and plug-ins
from Salesforce.com and hundreds of other vendors. Over half of these applications are free and
provide extra features and eye-candy that are a big help in getting users to adopt the system – a
key success factor for your business. With both of these attributes, Salesforce.com is without
peer, and their advantage will last a while
This was first published in April 2009