… and points beyond

Two announcements this week, all centered around small and mid-market applications built on flexible platforms. Force.com from Salesforce.com is a rebranding of their technology with a focus beyond CRM applications. This article mentions some promising case studies including 45,000 users running on the Salesforce.com platform already. That’s the Japanese post office, so obviously internationalization isn’t an issue. Not everyone is convinced of Salesforce.com’s potential. Joshua Greenbaum thinks that SAP’s A1S, to be announced on Sept 19th, will be the one to beat.

Either way, I’m pretty excited. On-demand, software-as-a-service business software platforms with straightforward development tools have incredible potential. Highly-tailored applications are the way to go, but you don’t want to be caught in the low-level details of databases and web service implementation.