Dreamforce 09: BMC Joins The Force.com Cloud
Even though this year’s Dreamforce wasn’t as well attended as Oracle’s OpenWorld conference, the conference’s energy level, and the scope of their guests (from San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom to former Secretary of State Colin Powell)—can’t help but lend to the excitement people are feeling about the rise of on-demand services. And yesterday, two IT management heavyweights announced their services would be available via Salesforce.com within the next year.
Salesforce has been hyping up the Force.com developer platform as a means of stepping outside their CRM categorization, and yesterday BMC and CA both announced they’ll soon be offering apps built on Force.com. CA is adding its Agile Planner to the platform, and BMC’s Service Desk Express will be sold, marketed, and available via Salesforce.com. The assumption here is that more companies will be able to partake of these services once they are set in the cloud.
The bigger message in terms of the IT management market is that this is a “back-office†sector that is moving toward SaaS. The CEOs of both BMC and CA were at the conference, and both declined to give pricing details, but the assumption is that these Force.com-based services will be available to those already subscribing to their IT management platforms. Demands for more cost-efficient productivity suites are rising across all technology segments, and this is proof that going forward, IT management vendors are going to need to offer cloud components (at least) to remain competitive.
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