Salesforce Cloud Life
Since the creation of Salesforce.com a decade ago, Marc Benioff has been predicting death of software as a product. InformationWeek 500 article discusses the life of Salesforce.com in Cloud Computing that started a few years ago and now the company not just preaching but also living it. The VP of Enterprise Strategy, CIO during the migration phase to Cloud Computing, says the company does not need database administrators or patch experts; instead the business process experts do the same work easily depending upon the business function. The softwares are already hosted on Force.com platform where customers, companies and independent developers built applications using programming languages and custom interface framework and without technical knowledge.
The company began migration in 2006 and discarded on-premise applications to move to application services on Force.com. The company is still not fully on Cloud Computing due to Oracle financials that form backbone to company’s financial setup. The company has worked on transparency and reliability issues by providing complete details to disruptions and outages customers faced on their website. The company still maintains uptime of 99.997% which is very good as per industry standard.
Salesforce.com has adopted Agile software development method that allows even non-technical people to develop applications. Since basic code is already running on the website, they can write small and limited functionality applications for their own. The company has formed Scrum teams that have both IT and business professionals who develop applications faster and deploy quicker than regular application development and that is accomplished with minimum input from IT. There’s no need to hire experts of Java, .NET and Database Administration since one works at application layer and beneath that everything is already taken care off.
Many companies have shifted their entire departmental functions to Salesforce.com and designed custom applications without involving their IT department; the need to extensively test customized software is no longer required. Salesforce.com has over $1 Billion in annual revenues with many big names as its clients and although it hasn’t killed software industry, it has set a high standard for Cloud Computing.
