It wouldn’t be acceptable if all it did was abort unacceptable behaviour. We implement capabilities where a well-constructed application can query the platform on functions it wants to perform. Returning a million results from a user’s poorly formed query is obviously not useful to the user, and obviously it’s not an acceptable burden on the platform either. So you can write applications that provide a well-behaved user experience while at the same time respecting the need to avoid unreasonable burdens on shared resources.  As a result, we’re able to make very rigorous statements about preserving performance, maintaining data integrity, and assuring that none of the applications running in our platform becomes in any way a pathway to invidious acts that would damage the experience of other applications.

DMR: People love your story about respecting shared resources. But in a world with seemingly unlimited computing infrastructure of Amazon S3, a Sun cloud, and Microsoft Azure at my fingertips, why bother? How do you compete against the rapidly emerging CRM suites built on this cloud infrastructure such as NetSuite, ZohoCRM, Sugar CRM, Heap, Microsoft Dynamics CRM? How do you prevent that Salesforce CRM becomes a commodity?

Peter: Here’s my answer to that: Every time another company gets into the business of selling its expertise in the form of an application that you use as a service, I have one more set of voices out there helping me to make the customer comfortable with the idea that they can host sensitive data in someone else’s system and run important business logic in someone else’s system. The most expensive part of our process of acquiring a new customer is simply getting them comfortable with this whole Cloud model in the first place.  

So every time I get a great, big gun like Microsoft or SAP or Oracle finally agreeing that the Cloud model is fundamentally a valid model, that’s good for me because now I compete on nothing but the pure business value and demonstrated care for the customer that make a top tier service provider, which is different from being a top tier technology provider.

DMR: So what’s next for salesforce.com? What do you see on the horizon? What’s the next big thing that you’re working on?

Peter: In the last three or four months we’ve taken functions like service and support and instead of merely providing the same capability as the world leading service and support tools, but in the Cloud, we thought about how to re-conceive the fundamental mission of a service and support tool given the existence of the Cloud. 
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