An Adobe official sees the deal with Salesforce.com as a way to make Force.com more mainstream. Force.com, said Dave Gruber, group manager with the Adobe platform business unit, has been well-respected by Salesforce.com users but has had a lack of visibility and a lack of tooling for deploying applications to the cloud.

"This solution provides a very mature tool offering," Gruber said.

"This will open up a new audience for the Force.com [platform]," which would be the Adobe Flex developer base, he said. The Flex framework is part of the Flash platform. Gruber said he sees applications being built ranging from mobile workforce applications to inventory management and supplier and manufacturing-related applications.

"The other big use case of this offering will be for the Salesforce.com installed base to add rich data visualization to their applications and extend those applications with richer workflow," said Gruber.

Force.com is being looked at more than just as a CRM extender, according to Eric Knipp, senior research analyst at Gartner. "Increasingly, companies are looking at Force.com as a way to develop applications that may not be tied to [CRM]," he said. But these companies probably did find out about Force.com through associations with the CRM platform, Knipp said.