The Case of salesforce.com, Essay Example

The case of Salesforce.com is particularly interesting with regard to the input of functional requirements. According to Velte, Velte, and Elsenpeter (2010), Salesforce.com boasts “The Sales Cloud—The popular cloud computing sales application”; “The Service Cloud—The platform for customer service that lets companies tap into the power of customer conversations…” and “Your Cloud—Powerful capabilities to develop custom applications on its cloud computing platform, Force.com” (p. 57). The Salesforce.com platform is open to other companies “as a place to build and deploy their software services”, complete with “a relational database, user interface options, business logic” and many more options (p. 57). The functional requirements, then, are inputs from the users. The company’s architecture is multitenant, “similar to Google, Amazon, and eBay,” meaning that “servers and other resources are shared by customers, rather than given to a single account” (p. 57).

According to Henschen (2011b), Salesforce.com has now embraced HTML5 “to better support tablets and other mobile devices” (para. 1). Salesforce.com customers “’have built over 240,000 custom apps with Force.com, and with touch.salesforce.com they’ll become instantly mobile’” (para. 7). The comparisons and contrasts with Commerce360 are illuminating: a key point of similarity is that Commerce360 ties into the Registrar360 and University360 online corporate university suite of tools, promoting integration in a manner somewhat similar to Salesforce.com. A key point of difference is that Salesforce.com is multi-tenanted and also allows other companies access to its platform. Both Commerce360 and Salesforce.com market products and/or services online; however, with Salesforce.com a key emphasis is the ability to design and create one’s own apps. However, the key to these important differences is the very different purposes and specializations of the respective systems: Commerce360 for e-commerce on a closed platform, Salesforce.com for CRM and apps on an open platform.