Development platforms for SaaS (Software as a Service)
Force.com has been marketed as a platform for services for those who want to provide software as a solution. With the backing and experience of Salesforce.com, force.com is attracting a lot of attention.
The question as to why people believe that force.com has the probability of success as a development platform for SaaS as compared to others? Industry experts believe that force.com will succeed as a lot of internal team is big organizations and corporates are using Salesforce.com which is a CRM solution built by force.com. Over the years Salesforce has evolved into a trusted CRM 
solution specially for small and medium businesses because of its ease to user, scale and monitoring ability. The Salesforce.com development has also managed to build addons for different businesses which has kept the interest alive.
Success of Salesforce.com has ensured that SaaS based CRM’s for different verticals are likely to use Force.com as a development platform. This has been proven by launch of VBioPharma Primary Care Edition CRM application which is targeted at the Life Sciences organizations. Every SaaS based CRM developers dream is to replicate Salesforce.com’s success even though it might be unintentional.
There are others who have a different view on this. Renee Boucher Ferguson who is a senior writer at Ziff Davis Media, reports that ISV’s (independent Software Vendors) have snubbed Salesforce as a development platform. She refers to a situation which developed after the Open Source SaaS summit 2008 when Znet’s SaaS blogger Phil Wainewright conducted an impromptu poll where 250 ISV’s respondents were asked the following questions
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How many people were considering building a SaaS offering using their own development tools and having it hosted by a 3rd party?
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How many people were looking at a software+services approach?
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How many people were considering Salesforce’s Force.com (this is the fun one)?
The results were surprising. Only 2 respondents said that they are looking at force.com. 40 respondents said that they would develop their own development platform and 10 respondents were thinking about using another developer platform. This is not good news for force.com given the fact that this poll was conducted by someone who is a known person in the SaaS vertical and the fact that it has been reported across the Internet does not help force.com. The main reasons why people do not use force.com is that it is expensive, not a true platform and the vendor lock in.
In the end one can say that there is great potential in development platform services as the development platforms would be used by SaaS developers based on the functions of the service.
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