, the deal involves provision of a unified development environment, Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com, for more easily deploying Flash applications on Force.com. The environment is expected to be used for applications to extend Salesforce.com CRM applications, to build business applications or Web sites and to build desktop applications that can run outside of a browser.

"We think this will drive a wider [use] of Force.com," said Eric Stahl, director of product marketing at Salesforce.com. The three-year-old Force.com platform currently has 63,000 customers who have built 120,000 applications.

A current user of Force.com agreed. The Adobe endeavor "will widen a lot of eyes around what Force.com can do," said Adam Wiebe, managing partner with Infowelders, which offers a hosted professional services application on Force.com that is not tied to the Salesforce.com CRM application. The company also provides its Infowelders Revenue Heat Map on the Salesforce.com AppExchange online application store.  Revenue Heat Map is linked to the Salesforce.com CRM system and visualizes past and future revenues.

The Adobe-Salesforce.com arrangement calls for using Flash on the front end of the application and Salesforce.com's Apex programming language on the back end. Developers could access the Force.com database. They also would use Adobe Flash development technologies including MXML and ActionScript.