Monday, December 12, 2005

Salesforce.com offers development sandbox

As part of its AppExchange service, Salesforce.com is now offering users the ability to run test, development, or training copies of their applications, including any custom or third-party applications that the user is running on top of Salesforce.com. CNET has a summary.

Of course, in-house application development organizations have been maintaining testing environments since the early days of corporate computing in the 1950s. But for software on-demand, this is an important step in increasing adoption of hosted applications. Software on-demand is often hamstrung by difficulty in creating custom modifications or generally doing anything outside of running the production environment.

On-demand providers such as Oracle that install a separate instance of the application for each customer can offer multiple environments without much difficulty. But, to my knowledge, Salesforce.com is the first provider operating under a multi-tenant architecture--once system instance supporting multiple customers--to offer such a capability.

If you can read past the marketing fluff, there's more info on the Salesforce.com website.

Related posts
Salesforce.com set to strike out with AppExchange?
Software on demand: attacking the cost structure of business systems

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