Industry experts, executives, and entrepreneurs gathered in Santa Clara for SDForum’s full-day "Software as a Service" event. The sold out conference kicked off with a panel, which included CNET founder Halsey Minor, talking about the practical considerations of the burgeoning model. (The CIO weblog, also covering the event, has a few notes on this).
A keynote from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, identified the Internet, virtualization, and commoditization as key drivers for software as a service. He explained that utility computing is enabled by these drivers, a combination of cheap communications and democratization. He said that there will eventually be a Salesforce.com desktop environment built from the first on-demand multitasking environment.
"This new on-demand architecture is the company’s data management strategy", Benioff said.� After a brief demo, Benioff repeated his mantra that the ultimate goal of his company is to "bring on the end of software"…or at least the way business software is currently built and sold.
