The seismic shift is being made possible partly by Salesforce. Their users tend to be the top tiers of management and sales, and they have completely sold that level of users in so many small and extremely large corporations. This means that the rest of these companies' users are easy targets to shift over to web applications if a meaningful service is made available as the upper management fully understands web applications and their value. Having that new set of web application operate seamlessly with upper management, and feed financial data back to upper mangement for analytics is a very big deal.
The seismic shift is being made possible by reliable secure data platforms. We plan to use S3 and have an xml option for extracting all data. For businesses, the ROI of using web apps is growing tremendously. The cost of providing all that infrastructure in house is huge, and the applications they currently use are very poor at collaborative work, which is what most businesses need. So the door is open right now in a way I've never seen before for business web applications that work well and connect to other applications. The key is interconnecting all of the companies data - something most companies have only dreamed of until now that the web approach can provide in an elegant and low-cost way.
thanks.
I think the technical highlight was seeing Adobe's Flex and Apollo in action. Truly impressive. Salesforce has also opened their API for mashups and created their own language, APEX, run on their "cloud" that developers can use. Their idea is to create a high value platform on which business applications can be built and communicate with other business data. Google was there as well, demonstrating how to connect salesforce to Google apps.
Salesforce currently has over 600,000 paying subscribers at a price of $60 to $250 per month per user, with some very large companies that have up to 20,000 plus users. They do plan to profit heavily from developers that work with them, from 10% of any subscriptions by app exchange developers, to large costs for exhibiting at their conference, etc.
One of the featured speakers at the event was the CEO of a 6 person company in Toronto that develops exclusively for Salesforce's app exchange. They are currently in line for making 2.4 million this year after bringing in 1 million last year. Of those 6, only two are in the same location. He owns 100% of his company with no outside investment.
There is no doubt that a seismic shift is taking place for businesses using web applications instead of supporting their own IT infrastructure. I think this is similar to the Lotus 123 explosion with PC's.