Angus Kidman14 November 2008, 7:15 AM
Need a business web site but don't fancy the hosting costs? On-demand apps provider Salesforce.com is offering a free site hosting for existing customers.
Salesforce.com, provider of on-demand CRM and other applications is getting creative with its offers. At its annual Dreamforce conference, CEO Marc Benioff (pictured) launched Force.com Sites, which provides a hosting system for users of Salesforce.com's software-as-a-service range.
Existing applications running on the Salesforce.com platform -- including both its own software and programs from third parties sold through its AppExchange online store -- can automatically be integrated into a hosted site, and customised using CSS and other standard web technologies. "All applications can transform into public web sites," Benioff said.
The only cost for a basic site is the existing Salesforce.com subscription charged per registered (in-office) user, which starts from around $9 a month. For very high-traffic sites, Salesforce.com starts charging extra, but the free option allows 50,000 page views per month, which would cover the needs of many non-Web-centric businesses. $US1,000 a month gets you 1 million page views a month, and $US3,000 covers 5 million.
The Force.com sites project is currently in technical preview, but expected to be broadly available early in 2009.
Salesforce.com has already used the system to host brainstorming sites for Dell and Starbucks. "The performance is great," said Starbucks CTO Chris Bruzzo. While you'd be unlikely to select Salesforce.com purely for site hosting, for businesses already using some of its software-as-a-service offerings, it's a potentially simple and appealing concept.
Salesforce.com is also looking to extend its reach by allowing its applications to be integrated into Facebook, allowing its Apex programming language to directly work with Facebook APIs. Quite why you'd want business applications in a social networking environment isn't immediately clear, but uses Benioff suggested included recruiting applications (allowing people to recommend their friends for particular jobs) and allowing companies to track public reaction to different product concepts.