VMForce - Expanding Salesforce.com’s Development Platform?

On April 27th, Salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff, and VMWare’s CEO, Paul Maritz, will be making a joint product announcement via a live Webcast. The new product will be called VMForce. We really don’t know anything about the new product yet, but based on the two companies involved, we can do a little speculation.

Let me start off by saying, I really don’t know what the new product will be. These are purely my thoughts, and maybe a few hopes, for what could come of this.

If you go to the new VMForce website, you won’t find much information, except for a sign up form for the live webcast on April 27th, and one brief paragraph claiming “... they will make an exciting joint product announcement on the future of cloud computing”. So, what does this all mean?

For starters, the name VMForce seems to imply something along the development side for Salesforce.com. They already have Force.com, which is the name they use for their development platform. VMForce would be a logical naming convention for merging VMWare into their already existing development platform. 

Another clue to what this new product may consist of is VMWare’s relatively recent acquisition of SpringSource. SpringSource makes tools to quickly build, deploy, and run applications in virtual environments. Their tc Server is a lightweight Java server that is based on Apache’s Tomcat, and designed specifically to run on virtual platforms. Their tools can bring Java development to the cloud.

So, is Salesforce.com looking to expand its development platform by offering developers on demand virtual machines, capable of running applications written in Java, or some other language for that matter? I for one certainly hope so. While I think Salesforce.com’s Apex programming language is great for being as new as it is, I’ve often found myself wanting to do more. Things like strict governor limits, and missing features have often made development more difficult than it would have been in another, more mature language. I think a truly integrated platform-as-a-service product could really be an advantage for Salesforce.com to bring more developers, and companies into the cloud.

To sign up for the Webcast, go to www.vmforce.com and fill out the registration form.