Big Data. Big Decisions
 InformationWeek
Special Coverage Series


Salesforce Enticing Customers With Force.com Free Edition

The initiative lets customers build Web applications and, if they wish, their own branded Web site to be operated on the Salesforce.com infrastructure.

By Charles Babcock InformationWeek
June 16, 2009 06:00 AM

Salesforce.com often signs up customers who come to its Force.com set of tools and build their first application online. So Salesforce.com is making that experience free through a new offering on Monday, Force.com Free Edition.

An application with up to 100 authenticated employee users or up to 250,000 public page views per month will be hosted for free. When traffic moves above those points, Salesforce.com charges $25 per user per month or $1,000 per month for up to one million external visitor views.

"We can't think of a better way to accelerate the adoption of our platform than to make the first application on us," said Ariel Kelman, senior director of Salesforce platform product marketing, in an interview.

Salesforce.com is pairing its Force.com Free Edition application building capability with a Force.com Sites offering that allows a customer to mount an application as an employee-facing or public-facing Web site on Salesforce's infrastructure. In the past, the firm has offered CRM and ERP applications that could be customized and still run on its site. Now it's letting customers build both Web applications and, if they wish, their own branded Web site to be operated on the Salesforce.com infrastructure.

Kelman cited as an example the Starbucks Pledge5 Web site, built in three weeks to allow the Starbucks CEO to announce it on the eve of President Barack Obama's inauguration day. The site lists volunteer projects in each user's zip code and asks them to pledge five hours of community service to one of them. Built with Salesforce.com tools on the Salesforce.com infrastructure, Kelman said the site experienced three million views in its first day of operation.

He called the latter an example of how Salesforce.com is moving beyond software as a service into cloud computing. Force.com Free Edition

Force.com Sites adds a simple Web page building process to the standard tools that Salesforce has already made available to customers to build customizations and mash-ups of its existing applications. The pages are built with standard Web technologies, such as HTML and JavaScript, and given extra tags that can be used to display them in sequence.

 1 | 2  | Next Page »
, join the conversation


Related Links

Related Reading

News

Commentary

Most Popular

On the Web

Slideshow

Video

More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Webcasts

More >>


Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

BYTE encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, BYTE moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. BYTE further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.

Follow InformationWeek

By The Numbers

What Are Your Primary Concerns About Using Big Data Software?

Base: 417 respondents at organizations using or planning to deploy data analytics, BI or statistical analysis software
Data: InformationWeek 2013 Analytics, Business Intelligence and Information Management Survey of 541 business technology professionals, October 2012

What Do You Think?

What's your attitude about SQL analysis on top of Hadoop?
We want fast, standard SQL analysis capabilities on Hadoop ASAP
Hadoop is for unstructured data; SQL is for relational databases
We'll give SQL on Hadoop a try, but relational DBs will remain the mainstay
Given strong SQL support on Hadoop, we'd nix the data warehouse
We're not interested in Hadoop
No opinion



Related Content

From Our Sponsor

Five Big Data Challenges and How to Overcome Them with Visual Analytics

Five Big Data Challenges and How to Overcome Them with Visual Analytics

Business leaders often need a visual snapshot of data to quickly grasp and use it. This paper identifies five challenges in presenting data and how visual analytics can resolve them. Solutions are suggested to overcome the challenges of: speed, data clarity, data quality, displaying meaningful results, and dealing with outliers.

Game-Changing Analytics: How IT Executives Can Use Analytics to Create Innovation and Business Success

Game-Changing Analytics: How IT Executives Can Use Analytics to Create Innovation and Business Success

Today's competitive advantage requires a deeper understanding of your business, your market and your customers. As an IT executive, you can drive that knowledge transformation. In this white paper, learn how to make decisions as a strategic business leader and three steps to begin an analytics initiative within your enterprise.

Data Visualization Techniques: From Basics to Big Data with SAS Visual Analytics

Data Visualization Techniques: From Basics to Big Data with SAS Visual Analytics

High-performance data visualization turns sophisticated analyses into meaningful graphics, leading to faster and smarter decision making. In this white paper, learn how visual analytics can transform big data, with additional features such as real-time functionality, mobile compatibility, robust applications for technical groups and accessibility for nontechnical users.

Big Data: Lessons from the Leaders

Big Data: Lessons from the Leaders

Financial performance, competitive advantage, operational efficiency, strategic decision making - every business goal can extract value from big data, and the time for doubt or inaction has long passed. In this Economist Intelligence Unit report, in-depth interviews with data pioneers reveal the link between the effective use of big data and the bottom line among other results.

Decision-Driven Data Management: A Strategy for Better Decisions with Better Data

Decision-Driven Data Management: A Strategy for Better Decisions with Better Data

Which came first, the data or the decision? This white paper makes the case for having a decision in mind, then tailoring big data's volume, variety and velocity to achieve business results such as overcoming customer dissatisfaction or creating well-informed strategies in real time.

Informationweek Reports

Research: The Big Data Management Challenge

Research: The Big Data Management Challenge

The challenge of big data is real, but most organizations don't differentiate 'big data' from traditional data, and nearly 90% of respondents to our survey use conventional databases as the primary means of handling data. We'll help you understand what constitutes big data (it's not just size) and the numerous management challenges it poses.