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Inside SalesForce IT (Video)

This won't surprise you: Salesforce.com wants every application it runs to be in the cloud. Now getting there hasn't been easy, but the company's Vice President of Enterprise Strategy (and former CIO), Trae Chancellor, sees all of the upsides (including proving the viability of his own company's business model, one supposes).

You can watch my discussion with Trae in the video below.

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Here's a brief summary:

Chancellor said that the easiest applications to put in the cloud turn out to be the more sales-oriented processes, like sales force automation (no duh), customer service applications (he calls it the "service cloud"), Google applications and HR apps like Workday. Most of this he attributes to those technologies being easy to implement and already having an enterprise focus.

But the harder ones are those that require more business logic. He pointed to the commissioning system as an example. But still, the company held tight on its mission because of the cost savings involved, and the ability to build applications very fast.

I also asked Chancellor about the challenges of supporting so many organizations building applications on the Force.com platform. Turns out that it's not much of a challenge at all; 70 percent of what's built uses click and configure functionality. He even worked with internal business unit owners to build their own applications in an attempt to truly live with the technology.

Fritz Nelson is an Executive Editor at InformationWeek and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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