VMforce: Opening up Enterprise Software
Today salesforce.com and VMware announced VMforce - giving millions of developers easy access to the cloud. It combines the best of Force.com — a trusted, elastic, multi-tenant environment for rapid application development in the cloud— with the flexibility and power of VMware and Spring.
VMforce will make it possible to build and run Java applications built with the Spring Framework, the open standard for enterprise Java development, natively on Force.com, the trusted standard for enterprise cloud computing. And development and deployment will be simple and intuitive. Just code your app in the Eclipse IDE with the Spring Tool Suite. When you’re done, you can simply drag and drop your app onto Force.com to deploy it to the cloud.
This partnership was born because VMware and salesforce.com share many of the same ideals. We both believe in simplifying IT. It just should not be that hard. Many smart people have taken existing tools and tried to deliver simple and effective solutions quickly. And often they failed. But it is not their fault.The culpability lies at the core of the technologies being leveraged. Salesforce.com saw this when we entered the CRM market over a decade ago. The technology being used simply did not solve that problem in a simple way. The complexities of customization, tuning, hosting, etc. forced IT to focus on the technology itself and not the business problem that needed to be solved. And often that focus became so intense on technology for technology's sake that engineers lost sight of the original problem. No one benefited in the end except the vendors.
The open world of enterprise Java computing has been equally plagued by complexity. The Spring framework is a phenomenal step toward solving that - as evidenced by the massive adoption by a loyal fanbase. But once you have built an amazing application, where will it run? Who is going to manage it? Will it have redundancy and disaster recovery? How scalable is it? Enter VMforce. The best of Spring with the best of Force.com, powered by the leader in virtualized infrastructure.
Best of all, VMforce moves us all toward a more open world, where we combine our unique strengths with the exceptional capabilities of others to benefit everyone: our customers, developers, the industry at large. Leverage the power and ease of the Force.com elastic relational database for your Spring applications. Add richer Force.com functionality like Chatter, reporting and dashboards, full text search, calendaring, contact management, workflow, and much more. Alternatively, take your Force.com application and extend it with Spring and the myriad of Java libraries available. The Internet has been successful because it was built on open standards like HTTP, HTML, SOAP, REST, etc.
With VMforce, both salesforce.com and VMware are committed to bringing our technologies to the open cloud community. Not only will Force.com services be easily and openly consumable by VMforce and vice-versa, but they will also be open and consumable by all clouds.
We believe this kind of freedom represents the future of technology. A century ago, the construction of a shared public infrastructure — roads, railways, and later air traffic routes — gave ordinary people the freedom to choose where they wanted to live and work and unleashed incredible advances in commerce, science, art, and technology. With cloud computing, we are seeing a similar shift in technology. By giving people and businesses the ability to choose which technologies they want to use, and where they will deploy them, companies like salesforce.com and VMware are laying the ground for a new era of equally dramatic change.
