Dell links up with Salesforce's development platform
Dell has reached a three-year deal with Salesforce to use the latter's Force.com development platform to build software for its "entire global workforce," according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
The deal is the largest ever for Salesforce, Benioff said during the company's earnings call on Wednesday, according to a transcript. He did not disclose the financial terms.
The two companies had an existing relationship. Dell's IdeaStorm.com Web site is based on Salesforce's Ideas application, and the computer maker also uses the Salesforce automation system for its global sales team, Benioff said.
"We also have been working with some of their key software providers to port some of the applications that they have internally natively onto Force.com for them to use," Benioff said. "And all of that together, suddenly we were one of their key technology vendors and it really gave them the ability to sign what we call an enterprise license agreement with us."
Benioff did not specify whether the deal means Dell is replacing its entire internal tooling environment with Force.com, or merely intends to build applications for deployment enterprisewide.
Dell could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.
"Having a big hitter commit to developing on Force.com is really important," said 451 Group analyst China Martens. "Previously, those committing have tended to be SaaS SMB players like Centive or Xactly or midmarket, on-premise apps vendors looking to get SaaSy quickly, like Coda."
In the past, Dell has "talked proudly about not needing to rely on a third-party vendor's ERP, but creating its own apps," Martens added. "So I wonder if that might be a possibility, as well as the ability to tailor Salesforce CRM more to the needs of its sales reps."
A sizable customer like Dell could also help serve as a real-life test bed for Force.com development, Martens said.
Also on the earnings call, Benioff cited statistics about Force.com's overall uptake. The service now has 100,000 registered developers, about double that of a year ago, and Force.com has been used to develop more than 80,000 custom applications, he said.
In addition, Benioff discussed how Salesforce plans to help its developers work with other cloud computing platforms from the likes of Google and Amazon.
"You are going to see us offering our customers natively Google App engine and other cloud computing paradigms directly from our [application programming interfaces]," he said. "You see it already where some of our ISVs build the majority of their application in Force.com but maybe will reach out to [Amazon], reach out to Google App Engine or others. We're going to collapse that access into our API to make it as easy as possible for them."
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Kudos to the Cloud Crowd for Re-Inventing the Wheel!
One thing 30 years in the IT industry has taught me is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Another is that the only memory we seem to access is short-term. A third is that techno-marketeers rely on that, so they can put labels like "revolutionary" and "innovative" on platforms, products and services that are mere re-inventions of the wheel ... and often poor copies at that.
A good example is all the latest buzz about "Cloud Computing" in general and "SaaS" (software as a service) in particular:
http://tinyurl.com/6let8x
Both terms are bogus. The only true cloud computing takes place in aircraft. What they're actually referring to by "the cloud" is a large-scale and often remotely and/or centrally managed hardware platform. We have had those since the dawn of automated IT. IBM calls them "mainframes":
http://tinyurl.com/5kdhcb
The only innovation offered by today's cloud crowd is actually more of a speculation, i.e. that server farms can deliver the same solid performance as Big Iron. And even that's not original. Anyone remember Datapoint's ARCnet, or DEC's VAXclusters? Whatever happened to those guys, anyway...?
And as for SaaS, selling the sizzle while keeping the steak is a marketing ploy most rightfully accredited to society's oldest profession. Its first application in IT was (and for many still is) known as the "service bureau". And I don't mean the contemporary service bureau (mis)conception labelled "Service 2.0" by a Wikipedia contributor whose historical perspective is apparently constrained to four years:
http://tinyurl.com/5fpb8e
Instead, I mean the computer service bureau industry that spawned ADAPSO (the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations) in 1960, and whose chronology comprises a notable part of the IEEE's "Annals of the History of Computing":
http://tinyurl.com/5lvjdl
So ... for any of you slide rule-toting, pocket-protected keypunch-card cowboys who may be just coming out of a fifty-year coma, let me give you a quick IT update:
1. "Mainframe" is now "Cloud" (with concomitant ethereal substance).
2. "Terminal" is now "Web Browser" (with much cooler games, and infinitely more distractions).
3. "Service Bureau" is now "Saas" (but app upgrades are just as painful, and custom mods equally elusive).
4. Most IT buzzwords boil down to techno-hyped BS (just as they always have).
Bruce Arnold, Web Design Miami Florida
http://www.PervasivePersuasion.com