Salesforce: Every Developer A SaaS Vendor

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Heroku, the Salesforce unit that sits atop the Amazon Web Services cloud, is taking a big step toward becoming a platform for software-as-a-service suppliers. But most of the budding SaaS suppliers that use Heroku will not be competing with Salesforce. On the contrary, they’ll provide custom applications and add-on services to the Salesforce product line, with Salesforce opening the door to authorized developers and their work.

Heroku now offers 85 such services from its hosting environment, a total that’s been built up over three years. But it’s got another 80 in the pipeline that will become available in 2013 as well, giving Salesforce.com customers a wide range of potential add-on applications and services, said Oren Teich, COO of Heroku, in an interview…

Heroku already offers software developers selected services, such as Amazon’s Relational Database Service and Bonsai full-text search, produced by One More Cloud. As of Tuesday, companies that produce add-on services that work on Heroku will find offering their wares greatly simplified. Heroku is adding a billing system that tracks add-on usage, bills the user and sends the add-on producer a check at the end of the month…

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