Old platforms killing biz apps: Salesforce
In the second day's keynote at Dreamforce 2011, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff stressed the need for companies to ditch old platforms, as they are holding back enterprise apps.
CIO Tim Campos(Credit: Suzanne Tindal/ZDNet Australia)
He said that using the Apple iPad was so good because of what was under the hood — the platform and the developers, who are able to use that platform to make apps.
"How do you create your next-generation enterprise apps," he said. "Are you going back to the old tools?
"We have to leave these old platforms, these legacy platforms, behind."
He singled out platforms such as IBM WebSphere, Microsoft.net and Oracle Fusion middleware as being dinosaurs that needed to be dropped.
"Yesterday's platforms are holding back enterprise apps," he said.
Ray Lane, managing partner Kleiner Perkins, came onto the stage with Kenandy founder Sandy Kurtzig, who said that Kenandy had been working on enterprise resource planning product based on force.com.
Lane took Benioff's line and ran with it, sticking it to old platforms.
"If you bought Oracle apps, you know that you get a lot of pain with what you're buying," he said. "It delivers a perpetual licence where you get stuck."
Salesforce's force.com and heroku platforms had 410,000 apps, Benioff said. Database.com has 100,000 customers.
Facebook CIO Tim Campos also took the stage, saying that since Facebook liked to focus on developing its product, it didn't have time to worry about infrastructure specifics, so cloud-based infrastructure was good.
He said that 70 per cent of Salesforce.com's infrastructure was software as a service (SaaS) with much of it on force.com, which he said Facebook chose mainly for its speed, with force.com helping Facebook keep down development times.
"The tried and true, slow-working waterfall methodologies don't work well," he said. "Or projects are all on the order of weeks to months.
"Force.com gives us the tools to deliver on that."
Warner Bros used heroku to create a Facebook presence where fans could buy the movie and watch it on Facebook. It also created a store to sell Warner Bros merchandise to speed up the implementation of a drawcard.
Heroku announced this morning that it would be introducing enterprise heroku packages, which provide features that large companies expect, such as 24x7 support and application support, starting at US$4000 a month.