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SalesForce Expands SaaS Hosting with Apex

With Apex, Salesforce.com expands its ambitions in the utility infrastructure business.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is yet another demand stream for data center services, with an increasingly interesting and varied field of players. Nicholas Carr at Rough Type looks at Salesforce.com and its opening up of Apex, its proprietary programming language. But there's more going on here, as Carr notes:

It's been clear, at least since the announcement of its AppExchange software marketplace a year ago, that Salesforce's ambitions go well beyond providing a simple customer relationship management system. With Apex, those ambitions come into clear focus: Salesforce doesn't want to be your CRM supplier; it wants to be your data center. It wants to underpin and run all your enterprise applications, while giving you the tools to customize them. Its original slogan "Success, Not Software" appears to be morphing into a new one: "Innovation, Not Infrastructure."

Isabel Wang also looks at Salesforce's new approach on her new blog at the Web Hosting Industry Review, where she's blogging about the convergence between Web 2.0 and web hosting.