What is VMForce?

Apr 20, 2010 by Sinclair Schuller

If you haven’t heard, Salesforce.com and VMWare plan on making a joint product announcement on April 27th at http://www.vmforce.com. Clearly, this piqued the curiosity of many, including myself. Thinking about Force.com, Salesforce.com’s strategy around the platform to date, and VMWare’s activity and intent to become more entrenched in the Cloud, my best guess is that it’s an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering, and maybe some sort of Spring-based framework layer that’s tightly integrated with Salesforce.com. Furthermore, it might even offer the ability to run native Force.com code/apps on top of it (I could see something like Spring being used  to create a harness of sorts to load Force.com apps on a native Java runtime)

Force.com is a high order abstraction requiring the use of a new programming language and a heavily diluted (read crippled) runtime. As a platform for extending the CRM functionality of Salesforce.com, it’s an amazing platform. As a general purpose platform for business applications, I think it’s too trivial of a runtime (anyone who’s read this blog before knows my position on this). Most mid-large ISVs solve complex problems addressable only through mature, expressive languages and complete runtimes and stacks. VMForce might be a step in the right direction – so let’s wait and see!

PS: For the literalists out there, one thing I noticed is that VMForce.com describes  it as a “product announcement” instead of “service announcement”. Maybe it’s some sort of special VMWare on-premises integration to the Salesforce.com Cloud?

What do you think VMForce is all about? Any drastically different theories?