Most IT departments spend too much of their valuable time on frustrating implementation, maintenance, and upgrade projects that often don't add significant value to the company's bottom line. IT teams are increasingly turning to cloud computing technology to minimize the time spent on lower-value activities and to allow IT to focus on strategic activities with greater impact on the business.

The CIOs of some of the world's largest organizations have been won over by the fundamental cloud computing infrastructure. These once-sceptical executives never looked back after experiencing first hand the host of benefits delivered by cloud computing technology.

• Proven Web services integration. You'll find that cloud computing infrastructures are by their very nature much easier and quicker to integrate with both traditional enterprise software and other cloud computing applications, whether third-party or home grown.
• World-class service delivery. Cloud computing infrastructures offer much greater scalability, complete disaster recovery, and impressive uptime numbers.
• No hardware or software to install: a 100 percent cloud computing infrastructure. Simplicity is the beauty of cloud computing technology. It also doesn't hurt that it requires considerably fewer capital expenditures to get up and running.
• Faster and lower-risk deployment. With a cloud computing infrastructure, you can get up and running in a fraction of time. In fact, your cloud computing technology applications can be live in a matter of weeks or months, even if they include extensive customization or integration.
• Support for deep customizations. Many developers mistakenly think cloud computing technology is difficult or impossible to customize extensively and therefore not the obvious choice for complex enterprises. Not only is deep customization and application configuration allowed by a cloud computing infrastructure, it preserves all those customizations even during upgrades. And even better, cloud computing technology is ideal for new application development to support your organization's evolving needs.
• Empowered business users. With cloud computing technology, you get on-the-fly, point-and-click customization and report generation for business users. The result: IT can avoid spending half its time making minor changes and running reports.
• Automatic upgrades that don't impact IT resources. Cloud computing infrastructures ended a huge IT dilemma: After upgrading to the latest-and-greatest version of the application, they would be forced to spend time and resources (that they didn't have) to rebuild all their customizations and integrations. With cloud computing technology, you're not forced to decide between upgrading and preserving all your hard work because the customizations and integrations are automatically preserved during an upgrade.
• Prebuilt, preintegrated apps for cloud computing technology. The Force.com AppExchange features hundreds of applications built specifically for a cloud computing infrastructure. All these applications are preintegrated with your Salesforce CRM application or your other application development work on Force.com.

A Cloud Computing Infrastructure: What's the Value?

The CIOs of some of the world's largest organizations have been won over by the cloud computing infrastructure and salesforce.com's cloud computing platform. These forward-thinking but security-conscious tech executives have fully examined Force.com and realized the value this pioneering cloud computing technology offers.

Salesforce.com frees companies from traditional software and its hidden costs, high failure rates, unacceptable risks, and protracted implementations. At the same time, it provides a comprehensive, flexible platform that meets the needs of businesses of every size, from the world's largest enterprises to small and midsized companies everywhere.

Salesforce.com minimizes the risk involved in application development and implementation. Technology should solve business problems, not create more headaches. With salesforce.com and the Force.com cloud computing technology, you'll be free to focus on solving strategic problems instead of worrying about infrastructure requirements, maintenance, and upgrades.

Significant savings in administrative costs are a big benefit of a cloud computing infrastructure; in fact, the savings can total more than 50 percent in comparison to client/server software. Cloud computing saves administrative costs in the following areas:

• Basic customization. Administrators and business users are empowered to perform basic customizations themselves with the Force.com cloud computing technology.
• Real-time reporting. Easy wizards step users through the dashboard creation process. That means IT's queue is free of report requests.
• Security and sharing models. Sensitive data is protected by the sharing model built into the Force.com cloud computing infrastructure, while making the management of security profiles much less time-consuming.
• Multiple languages and currencies. Check the Force.com AppExchange for the easiest and fastest way to add preintegrated functionality to your cloud computing applications. With the click of a mouse, you can integrate with hundreds of components and applications.

With all these benefits, it's no wonder companies are restructuring their critical business applications around cloud computing infrastructures.

Cloud Computing Technology & Application Development

A huge change in application development circles is underway, all sparked by cloud computing technology. Online publishing technologies made it possible to have information about anything in the world right at our fingertips in a flash. Similarly, the move to a cloud computing infrastructure for application development is making it possible to build robust, enterprise-class applications in an instant and at much lower costs.

Cloud computing brings the power and success of Salesforce CRM to your whole company, not just sales, service, and marketing. The Force.com platform has ushered in a new era of applications. New types of applications are now possible through a combination of "no programming" point-and-click wizards, toolkits for the most popular development languages for creating applications, and salesforce.com's programming language (Apex Code) for the Force.com platform. Developers gain many advantages because the resulting applications run natively on Force.com:

• All the benefits of multitenancy are boosted by cloud computing technology, including built-in security, reliability, upgradeability, and ease of use.
• Analytics and other out-of-the-box features, such as offline access and mobile deployment, speed application development.
• Even as applications scale to thousands of users, there is no need to be concerned about managing and maintaining any server infrastructure.
• A community of thousands of developers are focused on business application development for cloud computing infrastructures.
• An outlet for all business application development and access to tens of thousands of salesforce.com customers is provided by the Force.com AppExchange marketplace.

By eliminating the problems of traditional application development, you are free to focus on developing business applications that deliver true value to your business and your customers. And most important, the Force.com platform lets IT innovate while avoiding the costs and headaches related to servers, individual software solutions, middleware or point-to-point connections, upgrades, and the staff needed to manage it all.