For many of today's growing companies SalesForce.com is a part of life. Its suite of software tools are too well developed to ignore and too complex to recreate on your own. SalesForce likes this market position; they've fought hard to get it. In order to keep it they've begun to invest heavily in products and services that will allow them to "simply outclass" everyone else in the industry.

SalesForce SOA is a cutting edge example of this strategy. Announced today at the SalesForce Developer Conference, SOA uses their custom Apex programming language to let developers expose and consume web services within the SalesForce.com platform. I know, that doesn't sound exciting on its own. But maybe this will: Business Mashups.

So, what does SOA let you do? Nothing at the moment yet. It doesn't get rolled out as a developer preview until August. But the idea is pretty simple and easy to grasp. Basically it is a Yahoo Pipes style product for businesses. Only instead of consuming RSS feeds you are consuming business class web services such as those provided by Google Adwords and Amazon.com. Coupled with their rumored Google partnership, SOA shows SalesForce determination to keep and grow their market share.

As Adam Gross, SalesForce's VP of Developer Marketing puts it: "We've taken our inspiration from the rapid innovation the consumer internet has been experiencing and created our own set of similar business class products and services. Developers will be able to create products that mix and match web services and take advantage of SalesForce's scalable infrastructure and active user base."
The business model allows developers to easily create products or extension for the SalesForce platform using their Apex programming language. Once built you can sell and/or or give your creation away on their AppExchange marketplace. Since this is, end to end, a web based solution, there is no software involved. You build everything with your web browser.

For those playing with the APIs offered by Google, Yahoo, and other companies, the advantages are obvious. With SalesForce SOA you could create an application to pull reporting data from Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter and store it within SalesForce. Match that data up with your client list and then pull performance metrics (what your search engine ad spend got you) from your own custom ASP.NET web service. Match all the data up and massage it within SalesForce. Then, with a click of a button, push that data to a Google Spreadsheet. Think what you've built is cool? Sell it to other SalesForce customers instantly.

It may not be as sexy as Yahoo Pipes, but will be immensely more useful for corporations and will likely cement SalesForce as a market leader for years to come.

If you are a developer interested in SOA you can find out more at SalesForce's developer wiki. If you are a SalesForce user then stay tuned, a flood of SOA based application should start to hit the market by December.