Salesforce to launch development-as-a-service

That's the interesting thing with SaaS, organisations prove to be very innovative when it comes to pricing models ...

... Stealing a page from the Apple iTunes playbook, Salesforce.com announced on Thursday a $0.99 pricing model.

The introductory subscription pricing is on a per-log-in basis and is meant to accelerate the adoption of the SaaS (software as a service) ?model into such areas as human resources, employee expense and vacation requests, and job recruiting, where an infrequent usage model would not justify a monthly subscription fee.

?In a category like vacation requests, HR may live in that but every employee is not accessing it every day. This is for a new community,? said Ariel Kelman, senior director for platform product marketing.

The $0.99 pricing will be good for one year and will rise to $5 per log-in with a maximum five log-ins per user per month starting in 2009.

?Salesforce also announced a new Cloud Computing Architecture which Kelman characterized as ?development as a service.?

Dubbed the Force.com Development-as-a Service, the technology also includes the year-long .99 cent pricing model and uses the Force.com development platform which will also offer a .99 cent per log in service for developers.

Development-as-a-Service will give users a set of development tools in the cloud and a metadata API which so that developers can access code and the database schema. ...

Source: Salesforce to launch development-as-a-service
Date Published: Thu, 17 Jan 2008