Sandbox becomes a contained and safe environment where IT departments can test integration with back-office applications and customizations as well as train employees on a new piece of functionality without having an impact on live data, according to George Hu, vice president and general manager of applications at Salesforce.com.

Sheryl Kingstone, program manager, CRM, for the Yankee Group, pointed out that the more Salesforce.com targets the larger enterprises, the more IT wants to get involved.

"They want the environment they are familiar with, a test environment to play with integrations," said Kingstone.

In addition to the short-term operational goal of giving IT a familiar mirror image of its production environment, Sandbox also becomes a strategic component in Salesforce.com's long-term effort to extend its reach beyond CRM.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO, has often said that his objective is for Salesforce to become the SaaS platform for third-party service providers.