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First Impressions on “Tour de Force”

January 18, 2008

Salesforce.com today debuted their “Tour de Force” road show, a 20 city tour designed to immerse developers and customers alike into the possibilities of utilizing Force.com for their development needs. I attended the event at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, but the keynote was streamed live over the web and featured announcements, surprises, guest speakers and a little bit of bragging.

SFDC has a lot to be proud of, so they are right to brag. Three new enterprise customers were announced: Avaya, AIG and Comcast all with at least 1200 subscribers. Apex is now available for free with the Enterprise Edition of Salesforce.com (previously it was only available for free with Unlimited). And, finally, some of their customers and partners are doing some really interesting things with the new Force.com platform.

First up was Richard Hackenbrock from Dolby, sharing his experience with Salesforce.com partner Apprio while building a new application used to help monitor customer service and technical support issues for movie theaters using Dolby hardware. It was nice to see a real world example of how a completely new interface can be created for the Salesforce.com back end, and it certainly looked very slick, featuring embedded movie posters and movie trailers depicting the films being played on the screens they were supporting. A blunt comment on the challenges inherent to working with movie theater staffers brought out a few gasps from the audience, but was not enough to foul the general upbeat mood in the room.

The next presenter was much more interesting to a crowd full of developers, and tied in nicely to some questions that were brought up later in the event. Bob Morrell, CEO and founder of Riskonnect, an enterprise risk management system, launched his product at the event with a live demo for the crowd. An application built on the force.com platform with infrastructure hosted completely by Salesforce.com, but available for sale as a stand-alone product - available even to companies who do not have subscriptions to Salesforce.com.

Pricing was announced for this type of service, and Benioff called it “Cloud Pricing, Development as a Service.” Two tiers are available…$5 per login or $50 per month for unlimited logins. It was unclear exactly what this meant, but questions at the end of the presentation hoped to clarify whether this was in addition to or in replace of a Salesforce.com subscription. Benioff confirmed that it was, indeed, in place of a Salesforce.com subscription. This will enable developers to create stand-alone applications on the Force.com platform (which includes all infrastructure costs) and then sell subscriptions to it for $50 per seat per month, plus whatever they add on for their own application.

In theory, the smart move for developers would be to develop an AppExchange version of their applications at a lower price point in addition to the stand-alone version, but it will be interesting to see how the force.com community responds after having time to digest the announcement.

To wrap up the event, platform gurus Steve Fisher and Adam Gross from Salesforce.com demonstrated more functionality within the tools they have created for Force.com developers. And then, to finish off the keynote, two “Masterpiece Theater” style chairs were brought on stage and Marc Benioff engaged in a deep discussion with former Netscape honcho and current Ning co-founder and CTO Mark Andreeson about similarities between development as a service, web 2.0, force.com collaborative developing communities and the consumer-related social networking arena that Ning is playing in.

Check out the Tour de Force website for more details, including upcoming dates and sites for the road show which features immersion labs and instruction designed for both advanced developers as well as IT professionals and Salesforce.com administrators. - JS

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About the Author

Jason Stewart leads demand generation programs for Demandbase and is a recognized thought leader in the B2B lead generation and lead management space. He founded and leads the Salesforce.com user group in Salesforce.com’s headquarters location (San Francisco) and has spent 10+ years in B2B telesales, demand generation, lead management and marketing operations with a variety of businesses including Maxager Technology, MarketLive, and Inference Corporation.

To learn more about Jason or Demandbase, visit Jason’s blog on demand generation.

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Comments

3 Responses to “First Impressions on “Tour de Force””

  1. Jason M. Lemkin on January 18th, 2008 10:57 am

    Great summary. Might also add this was the most packed SFDC event I’ve ever attended … wasn’t even standing room when Benioff got on stage, let alone being standing room only. Energy there in morning/keynote sessions was pretty amazing and eclipsed anything I’ve seen.

  2. Salesforce.com’s Development-as-a-Service Has the Web Talking | Salesforce Times on January 21st, 2008 3:01 am

    [...] this link, for an in person account of the official Development-as-a-Service announcement written by Salesforce Times contributor, Jason Stewart of [...]

  3. Glenn Weinstein on January 21st, 2008 5:48 am

    Thanks Jason, great summary of the event. Two minor corrections - our valued customer at Dolby is Richard Hockenbrock (not Hackenbrock), and our company’s name is Appirio (not Apprio). We had fun demo’ing our VisualForce solution! — Glenn Weinstein, Appirio (http://www.appirio.com)

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