Next Monday, Salesforce.com will, in the words of one industry analyst, "extend the value proposition of software as a service" when it introduces Visualforce at its Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco. The Visualforce layer introduces the user interface as a service. Visualforce is the latest component of Salesforce.com"s Platform-as-a-Service, which the company announced earlier this summer as Force.com. Other components include the database and logic portions.
Visualforce will allow Salesforce.com customers to design custom application interfaces while incorporating other technologies such as HTML, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and Adobe Flex. The company made the move following requests from customers who wanted to present a more diverse UI, rather than creating applications that had a similar look and feel to the Salesforce.com CRM, according to Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce.com.