Social networking site Facebook’s 120 million users worldwide will now be able to access next-generation business applications following a deal between the company and Salesforce.com.
At the DreamForce conference in San Francisco today, Salesforce.com and Facebook introduced a new suite of tools to marry next-generation business productivity applications to the interpersonal power of social networks.
The new offering – Force.com for Facebook – is designed to foster a global development community for Facebook’s 120 million users and Salesforce.com’s 100,000 developers. The move makes Facebook an ‘enterprise-friendly’ platform for global enterprises and individual entrepreneurs worldwide, and puts Salesforce.com at the forefront of business applications for social computing.
Salesforce.com boss Marc Benioff said that the company’s cloud ambitions don’t stop there.
The company unveiled unveiled Force.com Sites, a new capability of the Force.com platform that will allow customers to run their websites in Salesforce.com’s cloud. Force.com Sites will give customers the power to publish Force.com data and applications to any website, extending their reach to new users on intranets, external websites and online communities.
The open-source CRM leader also struck a key deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
With Force.com for AWS, enterprises, independent software vendors and developers can build new business applications and run them entirely in the cloud, leveraging both the database, logic and user interface features of Force.com, and the storage and computing capabilities of Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 services.
Through Force.com for AWS, developers can access these services from within the Force.com platform to build applications that seamlessly span both clouds.
The capabilities made possible through Force.com for AWS will accelerate the creation and adoption of new kinds of applications in the enterprise that take full advantage of cloud computing, Benioff said.
By John Kennedy
