Case Study 5: Salesforce.com: Cloud Services Go Mainstream (pages 233-235)

Cloud computing, also known as on-demand computing, eliminates the need for a business to make large up-front hardware and software investments and reduces the time to implement new programs.
Subscribers to Salesforce.com don’t have to purchase or maintain any hardware (able it personal computing devices) nor do they have to install any maintain any hardware (able it personal computing devices) nor do they have to install any special operating systems, database servers, or application servers.There are no operating systems, database servers, or application servers to install, no consultants and staff, and no expensive licensing and maintenance fees.Users access the Salesforce.com cloud through a standard Web browser or a mobile handheld device.The new Salesforce.com Web site places much more emphasis on cloud computing, grouping products into three types of clouds: the Sales Cloud, the Service Cloud, and the Custom Cloud. The sales and service clouds help businesses improve sales cloud, and the custom cloud. The custom cloud provides a venue for customers to develop their own applications for use within the broader Salesforce network.


Question 2:

Challenges :

• Increased competition both from traditional industry leadersand new challengers hoping to    replicate Salesforce’s success
• Expanding its business model into other areas
• Ensuring the system is available 24/7 with no outages
• Defending the system against security breeches

Salesforce is trying to provide additional functionality is through a partnership with Google and more specifically Google Apps.They combine its service with Gmail, Google Docs, GoogleTalk andGoogle Calendar to allowits customers to accomplish more tasks via the Web. By partnering with Apple, Salesforce.com can expand its applications to iPhone users who will have access to
their data anywhere any time. Salesforce has additionally partnered with Amazon to enable Force.com customers to tap into Amazon’s cloud computing services (Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service) Amazon’s services would handle the “cloudburst computing” tasks of Force.com applications that require extra processing power or storage capacity.


Question 3:

Sales force gives company a single place to store all their information and can only be accessed by authorized employees. So almost any company can benefit most are:

• Small to medium size businesses are most likely to benefit because of lower cost and their inability for in-house computing.
• Businesses that are trying to increase the sophistication of their computing abilities could also benefit from using Salesforce.com application