Webinar : Introducing Visualforce - Create Any User Interface as a Service

Today I attended the force.com, visual force webinar. The speaker was Adam Gross, VP of Platform Marketing @ Salesforce.com. To give a brief backgroud, Sales force is working on a new On Demand platform called Force.com. This On Demand platform is supposed to address all aspects of application creation and delivery like secure infrastructure, Database as a Service, Integration as a Service, Logic as a Service, User Interface as a Service and Application Exchange as a Service. The On Demand user interface aspect of this platform is called Visual force.

The presentation was pretty nifty. They went through a hello world scenario on how to use the new UI capabilities and create an application on the platform that could break away from the UI looks of traditional Salesforce.com. Overall the technology is pretty good.

Scalability and dependability of the platform needs to be seen when multiple types of applications get hosted on this platform. A few questions I had that Salesforce.com has not answered yet:

1. How are non-Salesforce.com users going to access these third party applications that providers would like to host on the Force.com platform?
2. How is this Force.com platform going to be priced? This will be an interesting challenge.

Force.com timelines :

• Now -> Available for Developers to start creating applications
• Q1 2008 -> First customer pilot with a select list
• Some time in 2008 -> General availability

IT Changes discussed in Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2007

Gartner believes that there are five major discontinuities that will force IT organizations to change dramatically. The five discontinuities include:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS)
2. Web 2.0
3. Global-class computing
4. Consumerization of IT
5. Open-source software.
   

"The five major discontinuities have the potential to completely disrupt vendor business models, user deployment models, whole market segments and key user and vendor brand assumptions," said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "These emerging discontinuities reinforce each other, and their combined effect will prove far stronger than each individual trend. IT managers who oversee applications must incorporate these trends into their long-term planning."