Transitioning From The Enterprise To The Cloud

By Juergen Urbanski

At its user conference DreamForce’09, Salesforce.com released some impressive statistics on the traction that its Force.com platform has been gathering. The company claims 135,000 custom applications and 10,000 sites are built on Force.com. Already, 55% of the HTTPS transactions the company processes come through the API (i.e., from partner applications) versus only 45% coming from Salesforce’s own applications.

What drives that adoption and how does Force.com stack up against the alternatives?

New research [email info@techalpha.com] by GigaOmPro analyst firm TechAlpha contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of Force.com vs. platforms provided by NetSuite, Workday and Intuit. TechAlpha finds that PaaS is gaining most traction with corporate developers, not independent software vendors (ISVs).

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