Salesforce.com Announces Milestones in Cloud Platform Space

Sure, Salesforce.com may be known mainly as a cloud CRM provider, but the company has been pushing heavily its platform-as-a-service initiatives, and it seems to be paying off: New 2011 metrics released by the company indicate that it’s the market share leader for public cloud application platforms, with Salesforce’s Heroku PaaS offering just hitting its millionth live app.

The official blog entry recaps a few milestones we already knew as of Dreamforce ’11: 3,000 apps were built or installed every day across the Salesforce.com ecosystem, at a rate of one every 30 seconds, and 650 million transactions are executed on the Salesforce platform per day, which translates to 7,500 per second.

Some of the new noteworthies: As hinted above, a recent IDC report, “Worldwide Public Cloud Application Platforms 2010 Vendor Shares,” indicates that as of the most recent research, Salesforce is the market-share leader for public cloud application platforms. Similarly, Forrester Research issued two reports naming Salesforce a leader in platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Oddly, Salesforce also reported as new information the Salesforce.com AppExchange hit 1 million installs, even though TalkinCloud reported that back in October 2011.

But that 1 million figure for Heroku apps is new to us. And it speaks to the growth that Salesforce.com VP of Platforms Byron Sebastian was confident Heroku would see in 2012.

In that blog entry, Salesforce credits the channel with all its platform success:

“These aren’t just milestones…they’re just the beginning [emphasis theirs]. All the credit goes to the vibrant platform ecosystem – the developers, customers and partners who are driven by the fact that the world of business is transforming dramatically, and that success is predicated on collaboration, rapid development, emerging technologies and innovation.”

That jibes with our latest update on Salesforce.com’s channel strategy, which holds that Appexchange and ISVforce are the cornerstones of its most successful partner businesses. Needless to say, we’ll be watching Salesforce.com closely all through 2012, so stay tuned.