Software decision makers

A White Paper for Software DecisionMakers

Understanding the Business Benefits of Salesforce.com’s Force.com Platform-as-a-Service
How Software Companies Can Leverage Salesforce.com’s On-Demand Platform to Build and Deliver Their Web-Based Solutions

An independent analysis published on behalf of salesforce.com.

White Paper

Understanding the Business Benefits of Salesforce.com’sPlatform-as-a-Service

Executive Overview
Rapidly changing customer requirements and accelerating technological advancements are fueling the growth of a new generation of on-demand, Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. Faced with intensifying competition and tightening operating budgets, a growing number of companies can no longer tolerate the escalating costs and disappointing return oninvestment (ROI) of legacy applications. As a result, THINKstrategies has found that an increasing proportion of organizations of all sizes are considering and adopting on-demand alternatives to traditional, on-premise software applications. Many of these organizations who are aggressively expanding their use of ondemand application are finding that traditional, rapid application development (RAD) andlegacy architectures, such as .Net, are not well-suited to supporting their ondemand application needs. THINKstrategies continues to hear from customers that are frustrated with applications written in various RAD tools, such as Powerbuilder, older versions of Visual Basic and other tools that may have poor documentation or are no longer fully supported. In other cases, companies have had to deal withthe inefficiencies of having different applications residing on separate servers. These organizations are now seeking to standardize on an on-demand platform that can more easily and cost-effectively meet their business needs. They are also interested in thinking about the future and selecting the right development and delivery platform to support their future requirements. This white paper willexamine these trends and show how salesforce.com’s new Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model can help aspiring organizations accelerate their application development efforts, reduce their time to market and open new opportunities to enhance their on-demand solutions.

The Key Drivers of Today’s On-Demand and PaaS Solutions
A combination of macro-trends is fueling a fundamental shift inthe software industry from on-premise to on-demand solutions. The first macro-trend is globalization, which is opening new geographic markets for growth and lower-cost resources. More geographically dispersed businesses need new forms of communications to create and cultivate profitable customer and partner relationships across international boundaries. They must also contend with escalatingcompetition from these emerging markets. Not only are companies expanding geographically, but they are increasingly dependent on a highly dispersed workforce. This trend is forcing companies to adopt new methods to communicate and coordinate their remote and mobile workers. This means giving these workers new ways to access, share and act on information in order to perform their jobs and better servetheir customers. Many of these business users have become very comfortable using on-demand solutions in their personal lives using Amazon.com, Apple iTunes, YouTube and a myriad of other web-based email, storage, security, gaming and other online services. These consumer services have set a new standard for the type of user experiences that corporate end-users and executives now expect in their

©THINKstrategies, Inc., 2007

www.thinkstrategies.com

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White Paper

Understanding the Business Benefits of Salesforce.com’s Platform-as-a-Service

companies. Traditional, on-premise, packaged software products were not designed to satisfy the on-demand, multi-user, remote access and anytime accessibility requirements of today’s workplace. On the contrary, they were designed to...