Salesforce.com, which offers software-as-a-service to business customers, is giving them more options for customizing the user interface for different devices.
Visualforce is a component of Force.com, a new platform-as-a-service offering Salesforce introduced at its Dreamforce 2007 user conference, drawing an estimated 7,000 attendees. Platform-as-a-service lets customers, developers and ISVs create database, logic, workflow, integration applications and enable exchange of applications among each other.
Visualforce lets Salesforce’s estimated 35,000 customer companies create their own applications but it offers a template that limits options for other user interfaces, said Marc Benioff, in a keynote presentation Monday. Visualforce lets users modify code by clicking on a "Page Editor” button at the bottom of the screen.
The feature makes it possible for one company’s application to operate the same but look differently when used on a laptop, a touch-screen kiosk, a PDA or other devices.
“What if you could say ‘You know, I think a kiosk would be the most appropriate capability here,’ so you want to do a touch display and not have the tabs across the top of the page? Or what if you want to use a BlackBerry as a corporate device?” Benioff said.
The Visualforce option also extends to the Apple iPhone. Apple lets independent software developers write applications for the iPhone but only through its Safari Web browser interface. Salesforce’s new feature allows its clients to customize an app for the iPhone using its famous touch-screen capability.
Some in the software development community considered Apple’s move a limitation if their apps couldn’t be installed on the device. But Salesforce’s Benioff told Network World that writing an application for a Web browser makes it just as easily available to anyone with an Internet connection.
Visualforce will be available in the fourth quarter, Salesforce.com said in a news release.
Salesforce.com posted revenue of $497 million in 2006.
The company is a key player in the software-as-a-service segment, delivering software over the Internet to customers and billing them for an ongoing subscription, including software updates. This is as opposed to the license or “on-premise” model where a company pays for software to install and run on their own computers.
The distinction was made when Parker Harris, Salesforce.com’s cofounder and executive vice president of technology, demonstrated how Visualforce worked to Benioff onstage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.
Showing how an auto insurance claims adjuster, for example, could modify the user interface to their liking; one item on a claims form listed “Cause of Accident” and stated the cause as “Bad on-premise software.”