Salesforce and VMware Open Cloud Java Platform

Meanwhile, Salesforce gets a chance to sell cloud computing services to up to 6 million Java developers “who predominantly develop for the enterprise, a place where Salesforce wants to be, “ Pombriant noted. Meanwhile VMware gets access to a large new community that will likely need virtualisation products as it moves into cloud computing, and an opportunity to sell the Spring Java framework to even more Java developers.

Pombriant said he believe that the first market for VMforce will be existing Salesforce customers that have large catalogues of Java applications that they would be willing to move into the cloud.

Just as the force.com customisation platform won grass roots adoption by business users “I think that VMforce could be a grass roots effort for adoption within organisations already pre-disposed” to using Salesforce’s products.

Adoption will take time

But he said it will take time for the adoption of VMforce to gain momentum. Benioff says a developer preview of VMforce will start later this year. After that the partners will need to spend a year focusing on building a portfolio of case studies and success stories to show the technology works as promised.

However, at least one Salesforce and VMware customer says he is already sold on the concept.

Dave Smoley, CIO of Flextronics, an electronics manufacturing services provider based in Singapore, said that he already knows how he would use the VMforce technology in his company. Smoley took the stage at the April 27 VMforce introduction flanked by Maritz and Benioff, said his company has Java applications in operation now that the company would use more widely in its global operations if it could move them into the cloud.

Flextronics has 130 manufacturing plants in 30 countries. Smoley said he has one Java application in mind that it has deployed across several plants and would like get it running around the world. “Today if I put that into a factory I’ve got to put servers in. My IT guys have to build it out and it takes time,” he said.

But if he had access to a platform like VMforce, the company would be able to deploy such applications with “tremendous speed and tremendous scalability.” As a result Flextronics will be closely following the evaluation and deployment of VMforce, he said.