And as cloud-based Salesforce CRM has become the leading CRM solution, the application development world is turning to the Force.com platform. With its unlimited power to innovate, Force.com is revolutionising custom application development, so developers can quickly create robust, enterprise-class solutions for almost all business needs.

Enterprise Application Development Old and New

• Traditional methods lead to slow and inefficient application-building The traditional way of creating and running business application is too complex and awkward. Put simply, there are too many moving parts to buy, install, configure, and maintain&mdash. And the whole infrastructure needs continually maintaining to keep it working well.
  The overhead creates barriers to productivity in custom application development. Changes in a complex computer environment have repercussions throughout the organisation, which reduces overall IT responsiveness, and impairs a company’s ability to address changing business needs. So enterprise application development moves slowly and creates backlogs. In the end, business managers struggle along without the applications they really need, and make do with homegrown systems on spreadsheets, personal databases, or other unsupported platforms.
• The way forward: application development productivity in the cloud.With cloud computing and salesforce.com’s Force.com platform application development takes place—and all applications run—entirely on the Web.
  With just an Internet connection, developers can access an application development environment with all the tools and resources they need. So they can develop enterprise applications without the cost and complexity of buying and maintaining an on-premises development infrastructure.
• IT that contributes more value to the business. With Force.com you can add developers instantly, anywhere in the world, and give them full access to application development resources. They can quickly build and deploy solutions, reduce application development cycle time, respond quicker to user requests, and deliver the IT agility to take advantage of fast-breaking business opportunities.

Custom Application Development with Force.com

Force.com offers an extremely powerful, scalable, and secure platform for application development. Its complete technology stack includes everythoing from database and security to workflow and user interface—so developers can focus on assembling, building, and instantly deploying solutions.

Force.com speeds innovation through a powerful yet easy-to-use application development and deployment model. You can easily develop and then immediately deploy your solutions to the Force.com cloud-based infrastructure.

The platform also lets you implement business logic with workflow rules, approval processes, and custom code. You can store structured data, support Web browsers and mobile devices, integrate with other applications, do reporting and analytics, and scale up or down—all in near instant response time, with the security to run your business applications.

Custom Application Development: Build and Run Your Entire Business in the Cloud

The Force.com platform is the fastest path to complex enterprise application development. Companies and ISVs are using Force.com to build applications across all business functions and industries: supply chain management, billing, audit, tax calculation, event management, compliance tracking, brand management, pricing, accounts receivable, accounts payable, billing, HR, payment processing, employee on-boarding, claims processing, and much more.

In fact, there are more than 100,000 custom applications running on Force.com, and the platform supports more than 150 million transactions per day.

Enterprise Application Development Made Easy

Traditional custom application development platforms supply only the core services of database access and containers for logic and presentation. To create an entire application you need other software as well as additional components to run the data centre supporting the platform.

That means additional expenditure for acquisition, maintenance, and integration. With Force.com, you get a full enterprise application development stack—including a complete user interface to your data, comprehensive reporting and analytic capabilities, a flexible security and sharing model, and workflow and approvals – all available and integrated from the start. You can even leverage extended features such as built-in internationalisation, full support for mobile devices, and integration with existing systems.

Access to Force.com is through a Web browser, and both development and deployment take place in the cloud. The platform a unique blend of clicks, components and code, which increase developer productivity. Application capabilities come from simple declarations of attributes through pre-built capabilities and extend to a fully flexible application development environment.

Force.com enables rich functionality in all your applications. You can easily define your data structures and relationships, expose user interfaces to interact with this data, extend internal data with logical representations, and define workflow actions and approval processes

What’s more, the entire Force.com reporting and analytics system is automatically built into all your applications, giving you integrated functionality that lets you mine your data store for additional value.