Salesforce.com announced Force.com 2 today, which clarifies Force.com’s role as the umbrella service under which all of Salesforce.com’s development services fall under. The Force.com line-up includes Appforce, Siteforce, VMforce, ISVforce, Heroku (which Salesforce.com just acquired) and Database.com.
“First we pulled the top off Salesforce.com and made Force.com available. Now we’re pulling the top off Force.com and making the database available,” said Andrew Leigh, director of product marketing for Force.com told us.
- AppForce – The new name for the point-and-click tools that Salesforce.com has been offering to Force.com developers for some time.
- Siteforce – A new tool for creating web sites on the Force.com platform. Includes a full CMS and visual layout editing tools.
- VMForce – Force.com’s Java cloud, announced earlier this year, which is still in private beta.
- Heroku – The Ruby platform-as-a-service Salesforce.com just acquired.
- ISVforce – Salesforce.com’s platform ISVs to create applications for its App Exchange store.
- Database.com – The database powering Force.com’s services, available to anyone. We covered Database.com’s announcement yesterday.
Salesforce.com cites research by firms such as IDC and Nucleus showing that Force.com development is 4.9% faster and 54% less expensive than on-premise development.
For an interesting example of how Force.com is being used, check out our article Beyond CRM: How One Company is Using Salesforce.com to Process Brain Data.
Disclosure: Salesforce.com paid for a plane ticket and hotel room for Klint Finley to attend the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
