Tim Anderson

Salesforce.com’s chief executive Marc Benioff now talks less about software as a service (SaaS) than he once did. His new mantra is “platform as a service”, and the company seems to be trying to escape its customer relationship management (CRM) niche. At the firm’s Dreamforce conference in London earlier this month, one executive told me privately that if the company is still called Salesforce.com in a few years’ time, then it will have failed.

At the conference, I looked for businesses that might have gone beyond CRM. I soon found one: London-based Kitchons.com, a small business formed in July 2007 to service domestic appliances. The managing director revealed that the business runs on a combination of Salesforce.com and Google. The firm has adapted Salesforce.com as a booking system for service calls, mashed up with Google Maps to show engineers the exact location of their next visit.

The company apparently uses Google for everything ­ email, word processing and spreadsheets. When I asked the director if his staff missed any of the extra functionality in Microsoft Word or Excel, he said that as far as his company went, there was nothing in those office applications that Google Docs could not provide.

He also said he was looking forward to a new Saleforce.com feature called Visualforce, which makes it easier to customise the design of an application and allows export of forms to PDF. It doesn’t take any effort to add a new user, he told me ­ just a new account name and password.

This example shows that smaller companies are perhaps quicker than large enterprises to embrace web-based services. While few chief information officers are likely to sanction ditching Microsoft Office in favour of Google Docs right now, might more companies eventually end up using such online applications?

The same week as Dreamforce, I learned about the efforts of another small business in preparing a disaster recovery document for its Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) 2003 system. SBS has a built-in backup system that is easy to use, but the problem is actually recovering your server from backup if the hardware is stolen. Ideally, you restore to identical hardware, but few customers buy their SBS servers in pairs. Consequently, SBS disaster recovery is a specialist task, and since SBS is a single-box solution, the chances that it will be needed are quite high.

Is this case closed in the debate over hosted versus local apps? Not quite. Salesforce.com is a proprietary platform with its own proprietary language, called Apex, and there is a real danger of lock-in. The risk of system downtime is another issue, though the chances of Saleforce.com falling over seem no greater than the chances of a server failure closer to home.

Another major factor is that potential customers are wary about entrusting critical data to a third-party service provider. Further, there are still many applications that work better as desktop rather than browser-based software, though this is becoming less of an issue with the advent of technologies such as Adobe’s Flash, with its AIR variant that runs on the desktop, or Microsoft’s rival Silverlight plug-in.

Although these are valid concerns, zero deployment together with access to your applications from anywhere via a browser are becoming compelling features.
With this in mind, it seems an inopportune moment for Microsoft to announce prices for SBS 2008 that are up to 80 per cent higher than those for SBS 2003. It may be a good product in itself, but the future is looking more and more like it lies in the cloud.