Comparing Saas Platforms

The Challenge of Building Your Own SaaS Platform

Deciding which platform to develop and run your SaaS applications can be difficult and confusing. Many important factors need to be taken into account: Does it have the features you need? Is it easy to use? Can you build new applications or change existing ones quickly? Are the skills available in the market? Does it fit into your security and integration architecture? Can it scale? Is it secure? Is it reliable? Is it affordable? Does it help you solve real business problems while delivering value to your customers? There are also different ways of deploying and maintaining the platform that runs your SaaS applications - from building your own data center to relying on 3rd partying managed hosting providers.

Early SaaS ISVs including salesforce.com have had to build their own platforms using traditional software technologies and approaches - this requires enormous infrastructure investments and overcoming technical design challenges. But at the end of the day, the "do-it-yourself" approach is complex, expensive and slow - even if the software stacks are virtualized and managed by hosting providers.

The Force.com Platform - The Fastest Platform for SaaS

Force.com is the only multi-tenant platform designed from the ground up to build and run business apps and drive down costs. Everything is delivered as a service so you don't need to buy, configure and manage a stack of hardware and software products. It includes a complete application development platform, including the relational database, integration, security, a container for business logic and the user interface. All you need is a browser and an internet connection. Developers find Force.com more productive because we unify the programming model and tools from across the entire stack and make it really easy to use. At the same time, there's no infrastructure to setup or manage; all you manage are your users and your application assets. It's also secure, reliable, backed up. Your application IP is protected and your data is always available to you in a relational format

Here's a comparison of a "do-it-yourself" platform vs. Force.com: