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To: Tom Kearney who wrote (26781)	1/5/2006 1:42:13 PM
From: Bill Harmond	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 57684

If eBay or Google can scale like they have, seems Salesforce can.

To: Tom Kearney who wrote (26781)	1/5/2006 1:56:42 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 57684

yeah I've used it, peripherally because I am in management now. It is very well architected, almost totally web services. You can logon to their developer site (anyone can, you don't need to be registerd) and write java api's to pull their customer master data or whatever. The site is called sforce.com for developers. They have test data there and everything, you just can't see customers real data without some kind of key. Anyway, it is this webservices architecture that has me positive on the company, because I'm sure you agree with me that there is NO WAY that the top automation companies in the world are going to be able to run their businesses completely on a hosted product. In the 80s IBM got most of the revenue from the top 50 companies in the world or something and that analogy of where revenue comes from for automation still applies. So if Salesforce.com couldn't work for the top customers in the world I would not invest in them- however, with a web services architecture it is theoretically possible to bring parts of your supply and demand chain on site, do what you need to do to them from a custom perspective, and then re-engage with the salesforce webservice to upload your result back into the hosted model. There are a lot of benefits to hosted software from a coordination perspective (I remember trying to do a sales application almost 12 years ago at Oracle with laptops trying to "sync" with the host whenever sales in the field had a lead- and you know how well that works) and this level of remote connectivity is a given with hosted services. Also, the whole datacenter issue of having to man your site 24/7 is solved, plus worldwide access, and (this is important) connectivity to your partners who also might be using salesforce.com. This is what you get with products like this. The downside is the rigid architecture that can't be changed since the service is used by other companies. But I think its manageable with their architecture. jmo