My informal querying of Force.com developers reveals that with VMForce there are currently more questions than answers. While Salesforce sought immediately to dispel some of the questions that Visualforce/APEX would be left behind, in the fast paced sink or swim world of internet technology, a couple people on a dingy with paddles will soon be overtaken by those with the first available on-board motor.
Which raises the question of just who Salesforce is competing with. Is Salesforce, as the Appirians suggest, simply providing a gilded road into their cloud by allowing greater compatibility with legacy JAVA apps and providing “even hesitant enterprise CIOs” with a place to start? Or is it, as suggested on Javaworld, “an audacious jump to get Salesforce.com away from its ERP roots and into the general-interest cloud territory being staked out by Google and Amazon” ? Perhaps ZDNet has the best discussion of the issues: if Salesforce is truly “embracing the cloud” here, then they “pragmatically trades scalability of a unitary architecture for scalability through a virtualized one,” it also “morphs into a different creature.”
But even here it is not clear what new creature this is (see image). Salesforce can no longer simply compete with Oracle business applications, can it realistically think to match Amazon or Google to be a leader in a PaaS (Platform as Service) race? While it is one thing to take potshots at Microsoft’s failures in this regard (something I’d be all to happy to do myself), it seems clear that Microsoft will not be leading this pack.
While Mike Leach may be right to say that taking a step back may not be such a bad thing, Wes Nolte correctly summarizes the relative strengths of Google’s Web Toolkit in what one might consider Salesforce’s core area of strength and Force201 questions whether or not the 5x statistic regarding development speed holds for more than very short projects. Moreover, it’s been bandied about in various places that the primary venues for soliciting input about changes to Force.com, such as the Salesforce Idea Exchange, respond more closely to the needs of users and admins (who outnumber developers).
How can Salesforce emerge the heavyweight champion in the battle for the Enterprise cloud? I’d recommend the following:
(1) Articulate more clearly the gameplan to the developer community
Mike Leach has a great set of questions which I look forward to seeing the answers to.
(2) Develop a clear resource based pricing model to accompany VMForce, with decreased costs as bandwidth increases
As Wes Nolte also notes, the obvious answer for developers working off of PaaS is resource based pricing, which is clear and transparent in the case of Google and Amazon, but a bit murkier in the case of Salesforce.
(3) Improve developer tools
I’m 110% behind everything articulated by Wes in this article. Number 1 bugaboo: things are slow.
(4) Work off of existing Salesforce strengths
Tight integration between the code/platform and security are musts for many use cases.
(5) Leverage Chatter
Chatter is great, but could be better if, as I articulated at Cloudforce NYC last month, the benefits of social media technology for the enterprise were better articulated. Just how exactly do these technologies improve productivity? While we’re at it, why not extend the Chatter Dev Zone to include formal processes for developer feedback and/or bug tracking?
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May 12, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Richard Vanhook
Yes, definitely more questions than answers. There are many questions outstanding because they’re statements so far about vmforce have been a mile-wide and an inch-deep. (VMForce Prod Mgmt, please stop inviting the marketing guys to your meetings!) Also, I very much agree that VMForce needs to be more connected to salesforce’s main architecture. I head someone say it sounds more like “Cloud Hosting” instead of “Cloud Computing”. Over the long-term, it looks like Apex will be reduced to a database procedural language – much like PL/SQL is to Oracle, Apex will be to Salesforce. Perhaps the disconnect between the two environments will be reduced through good APIs/libraries to where the divide between the two is so small, it becomes barely noticeable.
Excellent list of needs at enterprise level. Here are a two things I’d add:
- An event monitoring and tracking system. And I’m not talking about a better debug log – the new system log will handle that in Summer 10 and beyond. What I’m talking about is an ability for an enterprise organization to monitor traffic and system level events. Sure, you can build a central utils style class which reports errors via email or web-service callout but that is too un-reliable for most enterprise organizations. Specifically this system would consist of baked-in event reporting for all out-of-the-box screens, a developer API for reporting events in custom screens, admin UI for setting up event categories, goals, etc, and then lastly a monitoring UI – think something very similar to Google Analytics. For most enterprises to really take salesforce seriously, they need this level of functionality so they’re not flying blind and just waiting for someone to report an error.
- More APIs and more hooks into the system. Maybe this fits into better developer tools, I don’t know. But this should be a huge R&D area for salesforce similar to how Apple does it. Apple will say things like “OS 3.0 software includes over 1,000 new APIs for developers and over 100 new features for end users” – that’s like a 10 to 1 ratio. How many new APIs did salesforce release in Spring 10? I can guarantee it wasn’t near that ratio and that’s a shame. Not to say salesforce doesn’t reach out to developers because they certainly do via their blog, documentation, evangelists, etc, and that’s a good thing. But in this key area, I don’t see enough progress and it’s frustrating to me. Most folks over-estimate the power of CIOs and under-estimate the power of developers. Developers can be more the change agent – good or bad – in an enterprise organization than the CIO.
May 12, 2010 at 9:20 pm
d3developer
Richard,
Excellent thoughts. If APEX goes the way of a procedural language, presumably Visualforce goes with it.
As for your other two points. The Google App Engine analytics package is very powerful and something that SFDC could certainly model internal reporting on. As for agents of change, I think that if there are multiple JAVA clouds then presumably CIOs will expect that the same code can run in each. Spring Source on Force.com or Spring Source on the Google App Engine? That may make the API functionality you are referring to even more important.
May 13, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Jesper Joergensen
These are great ideas. The API surface area keeps growing every release and we don’t always make a big splash about it because it’s metadata driven. E.g. every time we add a new object such as KnowledgeArticle or a new concept like Data Categories and Chatter, it usually shows up in the API. But I like the way you’re putting it here, and also like the event idea. Put it on ideaexchange…
May 12, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Jeff
Last July (2009) Jon M. ask me to round up a number of Appirians for an internal call. The topic was running Java on Salesforce. Everyone agreed that it would be great to run Java (everyone was a Java developer so go figure) but wondered about how they would implement some of the “magical” features of the platform such as SOQL, limits, db integration and such. How would you decide what to write in Apex and what in Java? Would it become a subset of Java like App Engine? Like Richard states above, there are a lot more questions than answers. My guess (I have no magical Appirio knowledge of this) is that they will charge a premium for vmforce which may make it viable for only enterprise customers that probably already have Java apps they want to migrate to the cloud. This may fracture the dev community with Apex developers becoming second-class citizens regulated to small customers/projects?
Time may tell but I’d keep Jason Ouellette’s Force.com Dev book AND Thinking in Java within arms’ reach.
May 12, 2010 at 1:57 pm
d3developer
Me too, not to mention the two books on Google App Engine I have on the shelf next to me (one of them yours).
May 12, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Jeff
Awesome! So you were the OTHER guy besides my brother that bought my book. Thanks!!
May 20, 2010 at 7:21 pm
Redkite » VMforce – A Big Deal?
[...] lot of interesting commentary has been already been written, but there are a few big questions still [...]
May 22, 2010 at 11:45 am
Wes
And now Google and VMWare have linked arms too… what an interesting melting pot.
October 29, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Force Architects: Delivered Innovation Blog » Joel Dietz: VMForce – Battling for the Cloud
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