Looks like the relationship is about to get more serious. According to this interview with Marc Benioff, Google and Salesforce are going to make a big announcement today at Tour De Force in Santa Clara.

It looks like they will announce a growing partnership in terms of their application platform. As you know Google also has their own application platform: Google App Engine. Like the Force.com platform, it allows developers to build applications on a hosted environment. So developers don’t need to worry about the infrastructure and hosting, they can just build their application and let the platform take care of the rest.

My guess is that there will be some integration announcement with Force.com and Google App Engine. Or perhaps they will announce a partnership to create an online market place for hosted apps. (kinda like App Exchange, but for apps even if they don’t integrate with CRM). I really don’t know, I’m just guessing here.

Vancouver based Peer 1 is hosting a free webinar with partners OnDemand Solutions and Mural Ventures. 3 speakers from each of these companies will share their experiences on how to build successful and profitable SaaS applications.

Click here to register.
And here is some additional information taken directly from Peer 1’s blog.

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Phil Wainewright started an excellent discussion about the different variations of multi-tenant applications. He identifies different multi-tenant architectures implemented by leading SaaS vendors. For example Salesforce.com, Intacct and Oracle all claim to host multi-tenant applications; but the architecture of each system varies greatly.

For example, Salesforce.com is the purest multi-tenant application. Each component from hardware to software, right down to the database tables are shared by all users. Therefore all users will be making queires the exact same set of tables and hence the same schema. This is what Phil calls: “1st Degree Multi-Tenancy”.

There are also lesser degrees of multi-tenancy where some organizations can choose not to be upgraded to the next version. In which case, users will be hosted on different instances based on the version they requested. This is what is known as “2nd Degree of Multi-Tenancy”

Even lesser degrees of multi-tenancy exists, for example Isolated-Tenancy. This architecture can include virtualized servers in which the application is running in separate virtual machines on the same hardware. In this case, the software and database is not being shared, just the hardware.

But the most important part of this discussion came from the debate of whether or not it is compulsory for SaaS companies to have a pure multi-tenant system.

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We all know how Marc Benioff can be quite vocal about his competitors. But check out this Dynamics CRM Online promo video. It’s 44 secs long but the customer spends about 30 secs trashing Salesforce.com

I thought it was funny that he didn’t mention a single good thing about Dynamics CRM. I guess Microsoft figures: “2 can play this game”

Just got out of a presentation about VisualForce. The Force.com platform is stunningly powerful and simple. If you’re a developer or consultant who wants to build an application on Force.com, you have to go to Tour De Force. It’s a day packed with sessions to get you up to speed on everything from Apex code to VisualForce.

Tour De Force makes many stops around North America and Europe so you can catch the one that’s closest to you. Best of all, it’s FREE. Go to tour.force.com to register.

There’s a good post on GigaOM talking about the true definition of SaaS. Alistair points out:

“Everyone’s on the software-as-a-service bandwagon … But not every company that calls itself SaaS deserves the title.

One branch of the on-demand evolutionary tree is what I’d call (at the risk of yet another unfortunate acronym) peripheral-as-a-service. As we move from a desktop to a mobile client, we’re unplugging familiar devices. And they’re all getting plugged back into the cloud.”

I agree that there are too many people are branding their application as SaaS because it’s trendy. When we were coming up with this blog, we didn’t want to blog about every other meToo.com Web 2.0 company. So we decided to come up with our own definition of a SaaS company and stick to it.

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Though not exactly SaaS news, Powerset has developed a powerful semantic search engine. So instead of just matching keywords; semantic search tries to understand the meaning of your search query. For example, if you search “children books” or “books, children wrote” you will get similar results from a typical search engine. But those queries are looking for totally different results. Powerset hopes to disambiguate these search queries using semantic search.
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