The 3x5 Case for Force.com
by Peter Coffee on September 22, 2009 at 11:48 PM
As Goldfinger said to James Bond, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence." The third time something happens, you have to take it seriously, and that's what's happened with productivity measurements for development on Force.com. A third independent study (PDF) has now confirmed a fivefold improvement in development time for custom applications, built by a diverse group of more than 1,100 organizations who were sampled by the respected research team at CustomerSat (a unit of MarketTools Inc.).
These results agree to astonishing precision with the previous results of studies by Nucleus Research and Galorath Inc., both of which also estimated 80% reduction of developer effort (with varying ranges around that mean) for diverse projects built on Force.com compared to similar work done on Java or .Net platforms.
Even if a Force.com application didn't come with all the advantages of cloud-based delivery – the near-elimination of capital costs, the operational benefits of world-class physical security and infosec teams, the nearly instantaneous scalability (up or down) with varying demand – you'd still be required, I think we can agree, to investigate any application development option that offered such extraordinary gains. We're talking about productivity improvements as big as those that attended the move from languages like C to managed-code platforms like Java, more than a decade ago: in that sense, it almost seems as if the next fivefold leap is merely arriving about when we should have expected it.
And here it is. I tell you three times.
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Comments
Posted by James Sullivan on September 24, 2009 11:35 AM:
These kinds of non-subjective 3rd party reports are what we use when clients evaluate other options for their business platforms. Your CRM investment should be measured not only in license cost but also in the amount of additional opportunity that you can capture.
Posted by Peter Coffee, salesforce.com on September 24, 2009 11:51 AM:
Exactly. The opportunity costs of doing nothing, or of taking too long to do something, are all too often uncomputed and unconsidered when options are examined.
Regardless of how you feel about President Obama's proposals for health care, he's done a great job of putting it right up front that keeping the present system is a choice, just like any other choice -- and that the costs of maintaining the present system would be a consequence of making that choice. More business analyses should take this approach, instead of treating current practice as a zero-cost reference point.
Posted by Shamil on September 24, 2009 05:17 PM:
Even though I am big fan of the Force.com platform, I think that a comparison of .NET or Java (or any other general programming platform) with Force.com is not correct.
You have to compare apples to apples. Java and .NET are general programming platforms that cover a much bigger scope than the Force.com platform. You can create a great number of apps on Force.com, there is no doubt about it. But those apps will still be based on the core CRM functionality that Salesforce provides, while using Java or .NET one can create completely independent solutions.
Posted by Peter Coffee, salesforce.com on September 24, 2009 05:29 PM:
If Force.com isn't appropriate to your application, I'd be the last one to argue in favor of using it just because The Cloud Is Good. On the flip side, how many people work in so many different application domains, while at the same time having brains that can only handle one set of platform skills, that they need to settle for choosing a single platform that does everything adequately but does nothing especially well?
There are platforms that are the software development equivalent of a Hummer. If you have no idea what you'll be asked to do with a wheeled vehicle before you have to pick the vehicle, a Hummer's a reasonable choice. As soon as the task is defined, though, most of the time something else will do it better.
Force.com is an amazing way to build and deploy applications that start with data, wrap logic around that data, wrap one or more end-user experiences (and associated delivery devices) around that logic, and send the result out into the world to earn a living.
Are there other things that people also do with Von Neumann machines? Absolutely. Would you write the code that runs a Prius drivetrain on Force.com? Heck, no.
Would you run the dealership that sells the cars, or run the Nature Conservancy chapter that takes those Prius owners on bat-watching hikes, or run the school that teaches engineers how to build something better still, on Force.com? So you can spend your capital equipping the low-level machine-language coders with fantastic workstations and tools, instead of spending that capital on email servers and the like?
Works for me.