Typical Uses

Typical uses for this would be applications such as vacation request systems or asset tracking, which may be used intensively at certain times of the year and not at all for most of the time.

Customers building their own applications would pay $5 per log-in; if they used applications built by other Salesforce.com partners, additional charges would apply.

The benefit to customers is that the platform gives them the development environment to create applications that might not get otherwise built because they are too far down the priority list, and the utility pricing makes using those applications less expensive than under traditional software models.

Salesforce.com would also get the benefit of extending further into its customers' organizations. "We're addressing the entire enterprise rather than just a sales and marketing organization," Gross said.

Denis Pombriant, principal analyst with Beagle Research Group, said the on-demand development platform will allow in-house developers to create more value-added applications, rather than simply working to keep the servers running.

It will also allow IT decision makers to reach further down their to-do lists because the platform provides resources in terms of time and money that they wouldn't otherwise have.

The platform means "you can have this development stack available to your developers," Pombriant said. "It's easy to develop this way."