Dreamforce: A Douse Of Cloud Computing, Without Getting Soaked

With balloons floating as tethered "clouds" in front of the Moscone Center and clouds projected onto the beams of the keynote hall, attendees at Dreamforce in San Francisco probably got the picture that CEO Marc Benioff wanted to talk about cloud computing. Which he did yesterday for two-and-a-quarter hours straight.Salesforce.com has done a pretty good job of putting power into its customers' hands by allowing them to customize their online Salesforce.com applications. Now it's offering extensions to its Force.com online platform that can pull in the services of the Elastic Compute Cloud at Amazon and social networking at Facebook. In this case, consumer technology isn't catching up to the enterprise infrastructure but the other way around. And attendees at the Salesforce.com annual user meeting, Dreamforce, yesterday got a taste of how consumer technology will next show up in the enterprise.

A user of Salesforce's platform, Force.com, can build an application that calls on Facebook's social graphing engine and put it to work for the business. A social networking engine can aggregate relationships -- known circles of friends, fellow graduates of the same university, co-residents of the same city -- and expose shared areas of expertise and interest among otherwise disassociated parties.

Have you ever wished you could put a social engine to work within your company, or between your company and a set of trusted partners? Wouldn't it be a great if you could form a virtual team to counter an emerging challenger in the marketplace? What if a social networking engine could find the people who already have been paying the most attention to the challenger and represent the best knowledge available?

How hard is it to customize a Salesforce application and get it to use social networking features? A toolkit, Force.com for Facebook, allows a Salesforce customer to build an application that calls functions at the Facebook site through the standard APIs, which have been encapsulated in the toolkit. This isn't particularly complicated, but only two organizations that are used to operating over the Internet and following Internet standards are going to be able to extend such joint operation to their customers.

In a similar fashion, Salesforce now offers Force.com Toolkit for Amazon Web Services. One part of the toolkit contains templates built as Amazon Machine Images, that is, virtualized files that can run in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, if they are sent there. Salesforce is making it possible to take PHP application logic and cast it into an AMI format, which would make it possible to manipulate pictures or work with masses of data in the cloud. Other languages to follow soon.

The idea is to build a Salesforce application and run it on the Salesforce platform as usual. But if you have a major piece of data analysis or business intelligence processing to do, you can send it off to EC2 in a ready-to-run format. This is "cloudburst" computing, where a burst of power from EC2 supplements the normal processing power of the Salesforce platform. The thing that Salesforce's new toolkit does for you is supply a ready-to-roll template, saving you from having to teach yourself all about Amazon Machine Image.

A second toolkit, Force.com tools for Amazon S3, makes it possible to call Amazon's Simple Storage Services from a customized Salesforce application. The application, which might be written in Salesforce's Apex language, is running in Saleforce's data center. But when it comes time to store data, the application can invoke the Amazon Simple Storage Service by using a call that has wrapped the S3 API in its code.

Salesforce is no longer presenting itself solely as the agent of online software. It is an advocate of the future, of cloud computing, enhancing its own platform by giving it the ability to reach out to Facebook, Amazon, and in previous steps, to Google.

It's sort of gimmicky today, when few people are actually pursuing cloudburst services. But it's setting a pattern for tomorrow in such a way that Salesforce customers can give themselves a dose of cloud computing without getting soaked.