NEWS
The web 2.0-style innovations adopted by companies including Google and Yahoo! in the consumer space will soon be invading the business software market as well.
The work done by these companies in terms of hosted applications and 'mash-up' combinations of applications is now being taken up by business users, according to Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of on-demand customer relationship management software company Salesforce.com.
He said these hosted or 'multi-tenanted' applications are moving in on the turf of the "high priests of business software".
Benioff said: "Soon everything will just be a service, business email or your PBX, all your business apps. It's already affected us in our homes and now these multi-tenanted services are going to pervade your business. It's not just one idea, it's not just one provider."
Speaking today at a customer event in London, he said: "They really set the stage for the opportunity we have today - it's the Google and Yahoo! and eBay - they did the heavy lifting."
Benioff highlighted Salesforce.com mash-ups with Google Maps and Skype as part of this process. And - paraphrasing Isaac Newton - he said his company had got to the stage it was at because "we are standing on the shoulders of giants".
He added: "Venture capitalists aren't funding software companies anymore - you have to come up with a concept of web 2.0 and that is a leading indicator that the future is on-demand."
At the event Benioff previewed the winter 2007 release of the company's software which will allow customers to create or add components that analyse and present data - so called "mashboards".
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1. Dr John Dimmock
Central application management is as old as computing itself – we were running this sort of combination when the only workstations available to us were “dumb” terminals
Yes, it is the way forward and many old farts like me have advocated central application servers for many years
The problem is the inherent lack of reliability of pushing data over the existing telephone network, it will be fine when we all have radio and fibre links but the business model for the monopoly transit holder at this time cannot include this kind of investment, they are simply not going to spend any real money investing in fibre
As a provider of WAN systems our main issues are that the lines from client offices to exchanges are VERY vulnerable and almost every day we see connections dropping between end user and exchange. This is wholly understandable, some many push fit connections running over a network that is “power” fed – great for voice but pretty useless for data
The real question is, would you consider running your business over 100 year old technology?
Dr John L Dimmock - Technical Director
Media Services Sussex Ltd
Metroweb Network Services
First Internet UK Ltd
MetroCell Ltd