Salesforce is at a crossroads - Creating a successful platform will require integration

Implications: 1. Salesforce must oc-exist with other applications and seemlessly integrate. 2. Salesforce "mashups" may be a better integration that currently provided by Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP 3. Since Salesforce has little choice, will they be the company that brings SOA mainstream?

Analysis: I do very much agree with the author of this article.  However, I see it more as one of the possible outcomes and not the most likely.  My basic premise is that I feel we are at an inflection point where we will begin to truly see Service Oriented Architectures come into the mainstream.  We are seeing this with many web 2.0 companies in the consumer space and Salesforce looks to be the first in the business space.

One can argue that web 2.0 could be a sea change just as the move from client/server computing to the web was a change about 10 years ago.  And since Salesforce is more closely aligned with this new technologies and is designed from the ground up to work that way, it may prove to be a competitive advantage.  What is less clear is will we see the speed of integration speed up the way we have seen the speed of implementation?

It is said that a Salesforce implementation takes from 3-4 months compared to a traditional implementation taking 8-15 months (I am sure there is controversy about these exact numbers).  If we see the same gains in the speed of integration that Service Oriented Architecture is promising, then we may find that Salesforce will succeed because it will be able to integrate more easily, faster, and eventually broader.

The author makes a great point that we have yet to see much significant impact from the Appexchange.  Let me remind you that five years ago we had seen little in the way of on-demand computing in general.

But here is the opportunity that exists.  Two of the biggest challenges for IT is the overhead of managing hardware and the complexity of integration between systems.  The promise that salesforce is presenting is the reduction of these challenges for IT staffs so that IT can focus more on a business value that on the IT operational challenges.  For this reason, I am voting for the underdog Salesforce because I want them to make my life easier.  I applaud the author for raising this issue and maybe even a controversy.  It is an important debate and one worth discussion.