{"id":544,"date":"2006-10-10T11:50:32","date_gmt":"2006-10-10T17:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=544"},"modified":"2006-10-10T11:50:32","modified_gmt":"2006-10-10T17:50:32","slug":"innovation_not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=544","title":{"rendered":"Innovation, not infrastructure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Salesforce.com’s announcement Monday that it would open up its proprietary Apex programming language to customers and other developers marks an important turning point for the company. It’s been clear, at least since the announcement of its AppExchange software marketplace a year ago, that Salesforce’s ambitions go well beyond providing a simple customer relationship management system. With Apex, those ambitions come into clear focus: Salesforce doesn’t want to be your CRM supplier; it wants to be your data center. It wants to underpin and run all your enterprise applications, while giving you the tools to customize them. Its original slogan “Success, Not Software” appears to be morphing into a new one: “Innovation, Not Infrastructure.” That phrase appears, in fact, in the press release<\/a> announcing Apex (though it’s spoken by an AMR researcher).<\/p>\n

Last year, I questioned Salesforce’s decision to run its software-as-a-service application on its own infrastructure rather than have that infrastructure hosted by a hardware utility. Now, I understand the rationale for the decision: the infrastructure is the product. While Salesforce’s move opens up new opportunities for the firm, it also dramatically widens the competition it will face. Everyone from Microsoft to Google to Amazon is moving into the business of being an infrastructure utility. And, in an age of standardization, it will be interesting to see how customers react to the idea of running their enterprise applications in a private language. Is Salesforce the SAP of the SaaS world – and is that a good or a bad thing?<\/p>\n

Dan Farber reports<\/a> that venture capitalist Mark Gorenberg views Apex not just as a turning point for Salesforce but as a watershed for corporate computing in general. Gorenberg “hailed Apex as the most significant announcement since Sybase announced stored procedures. In effect, Gorenberg said, stored procedures led to the change from mainframe to client\/server computing. ‘Apex will be the big tsunami for a new platform for applications,’ he concluded.” That’s a bit of an overstatement, but what Salesforce is doing is certainly part of a big tsunami in business computing, a tsunami that does indeed mark the transition away from the client-server age into what I’ve called the third age of IT<\/a>. At the center of that age will stand not the PC but the utility-class data center, providing companies with at once greater efficiency and greater flexibility.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: In another post, Dan Farber interviews<\/a> Salesforce’s tech guru Parker Harris, who goes deep into Apex’s technical details. Meanwhile, Sinclair Schuller makes the case<\/a> against what he terms the Apex “handcuffs.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Salesforce.com’s announcement Monday that it would open up its proprietary Apex programming language to customers and other developers marks an important turning point for the company. It’s been clear, at least since the announcement of its AppExchange software marketplace a year ago, that Salesforce’s ambitions go well beyond providing a simple customer relationship management system. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}