InfoWorld has an interview with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff who comments on the new release of Sforce which can host any enterrprise application:
As a developer platform for customizing and integrating Salesforce.com, we recognized it really could be used for more than just Salesforce.com, it could be used for other applications also. And that became the second part of it. That is when we said “we need to really let people know we have this whole platform that you can use: a database, a document server, an operating system, an application server, all these various things, but its all online, its all on demand.” Its a fantastic alternative to the traditional on-premise server.
much in the same way that Amazon has become a platform for companies to do e-commerce — you can build a Web site, the front end is Amazon, you dont know youre using Amazon — also you can do that with Salesforce. That is what is exciting about Sforce. You can integrate Salesforce.com between Salesforce and Oracle, SAP — or whatever your internal or external system is, or Amazon itself — and you can customize, you can build new forms, whatever. But now you could also do that independently. We took it to another level with Sforce-to-go in basically three areas. One, custom objects: Now, not only can you use our existing tables but you can create your own tables. Thats exciting for database developers. We gave them also a query language based on our objects in our database. Its object query language. And we also gave them this concept of an S-controller, an Sforce control, which is the ability to store their code in our server and then we call it on demand when they want it and run it inside Salesforce.com. That is, they can really modify our screens using a lot of different types of code, and that was a huge breakthrough for us.
Sforce+T