We’ve always been a pure cloud player – we just were not always called by that label, which really only emerged about two years ago from the concept that no one really wants to own infrastructure except the people who sell infrastructure capacity. Do companies operate their own fleets of delivery trucks? No, they call UPS or DHL or FedEx to get delivery done. There is no reason why IT shouldn’t predominantly be done the same way.

DMR: Talking about the service focus – Salesforce also enables companies to have access to a whole ecosystem of developers. Do you think that it’s the common platform and processes or the access to your customers that are attracting developers to Salesforce?

Peter: There are more than 450 companies offering more than 800 different applications that all directly interact with the salesforce.com platform. That number is growing enormously now that we have exposed the foundation of our application suite to the community as well, what we call the Force.com platform. It enables the construction of an application running entirely within our systems, or integrated with other resources either in the cloud or in local data centers. 

Developers can come to us with nothing more than an idea and something that runs a web browser, and build an application; bring that application to market under their own brand; and immediately be able to offer that application to a global community.

Two guys in Bangalore with laptops could credibly be providing technology to the global 2000 companies in two months if they have an original vision of how to solve a business problem and build it on the Force.com platform. They need no capital to build a server farm, nor do they need to prove their ability to administer security because they’re running in an environment that’s already been audited - nor do they have to prove high availability and high up time, nor do they have to field a global sales force.

You can have a rapid entry of talented entrepreneurs with almost zero capital, and with low risk on behalf of the customers evaluating these new market entrants.

DMR: That sounds great, but is it possible to build a sustainable business model based on someone else’s interests?

Peter: One of my favorite stories is when the the CRC Health organization acquired another health care provider and discovered that it was now dealing with a very heterogeneous IT environment that was both complex and not very scalable. So they used the Force.com platform to build a highly integrated system that incorporated the things they had that they wanted to continue using, and at the same time gave them a new system with a shared view of key data across all their various points of presence.