I attended a presentation by SalesForce.com today morning at the Holiday Inn in Salmiya. I was the first to arrive and was 15 mins. early. However, the presentation started pretty late caz they were either struggling with the screen resolution, the projector or the Internet connection.

Once they got going, it was impressive talk continuously. Besides promoting their Salesforce application, they were pushing their Force.com platform to everyone. In short, you can do everything on Force.com, you can do it in a fraction of the time it would take with regular systems like Oracle, Microsoft or SAP and to beat everything else it also costs a fraction compared to implementing any other systems. This got me doubting a recent decision to go with a “traditional” in-house hosted ERP system as compared to hosting it on the “cloud”.

There was even a demo from one of their clients promoting salesforce and giving testimony to the speed with which they moved to the salesforce and force.com platform as well as explaining the efficiency they got in the bargain.

Looks like its time to take a serious look at SalesForce and that Force.com platform. My only concern with remotely hosted business applications is that if the net is down, you can’t access your data, if the data centre is down, no one can access your data! :)