Salesforce.com Sites Slices Cloud in New Ways

03.11.2008

"It's time for you to think of us in a different way," he says. "We're going to do it with Force.com Sites. Now you can run your whole web in our cloud. You can run all your web applications on force.com. Not just your CRM."

The service, set to hit in 2009, will vary its pricing model based on the amount of page views a website experiences. Developers can get a preview of it at force.com.

One example the company showed off was how the New Jersey Transit has used the service. The transit uses an alert system to track delays and incidents that occur on its lines. Now, when transit workers internally post an alert to the system, provided it goes through the proper workflow and approval, the alert gets posted to the company's website for riders to see.

Salesforce will use page views as a measure to monetize the service. A Group Edition Salesforce subscription includes up to 50,000 monthly page views for a Force.com Site. An Unlimited Edition subscription comes with 1 million monthly views.

If more page views are required, the services charges $1,000 per month for up to 1 million more monthly views, or $3,000 a month for up to 5 million additional views per month.