Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Productivity, Web services, Google, Yahoo!
SalesForce SOA: Web 2.0 grows up, gets job
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."
After spending the better part of an hour on 