Here at Intalio, we have a great deal of respect for Salesforce.com, and their exceptional contribution to both CRM and Cloud Computing. We have been users of the Salesforce.com application since 2002, and have been running significant parts of our operations using its various components. Nevertheless, we also recognize that Salesforce.com imposes some severe limitations, which Intalio|CRM was designed to address, while offering the same feature set.

Limit #1: Deployment Option

Salesforce.com tends to be fairly religious about the "No Software" model of on-demand. While we value the benefits originally offered by the on-demand model (dynamic provisioning, elastic scalability), we believe that the very same benefits can be offered on-premises, especially through Intalio's Managed-On-Premises option. While Salesforce.com only supports the on-demand model, we support both on-demand, on-premises, and managed-on-premises deployment options:

On-Demand

• Hardware, power, cooling, bandwidth, and servicing provided by Intalio.
• $9 to $99/user/month.
• 3 users minimum, month to month.

On-Premises

• Hardware, power, cooling, bandwidth, and servicing provided by customer.
• $19 to $49/user/month.
• 20 users minimum, year to year.

Managed On-Premises

• Power, cooling, and bandwidth provided by customer.
• Hardware and servicing provided by Intalio.
• $49 to $99/user/month.
• 2,000 users minimum, three-year commitment.

Limit #2: Programming Language

Salesforce.com relies on proprietary programming languages (APEX, Visualforce) for supporting the development of custom business logic. While we recognize the elegance of the XML-based Visualforce language for the development of custom user interfaces, we do not believe that the world needed yet another object-oriented programming language like APEX. As a result, Intalio|CRM offers a language similar to Visualforce for migration purposes (X#), while letting developers pick the languages they're most familiar with for custom developments, as long as a Java-based interpreter can be found for them.

Limit #3: Capacity and Performance

Salesforce.com's multi-tenant architecture is based on database virtualization. In a nutshell, Salesforce.com's engineers developed a virtual database engine on top of a traditional Relational Database Management System (Oracle), with a proprietary and rather primitive query language. All objects managed by Salesforce.com (standard and custom) are stored within 20 static tables, some of them holding billions of records. As a result, Salesforce.com puts severe limitations on the amount of data that can be stored by customers (1GB, $2,000/GB/year above that), the complexity of the data models that can be created (no support for many-to-many relationships), and the kind of queries that can be made against the database.

Intalio|CRM features a very different architecture for multi-tenancy, leveraging both hardware virtualization (using VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus) and database partitioning (for free accounts). Such an architecture would have been impossible ten years ago when Salesforce.com's architecture was designed, for the lack of proper hardware virtualization technologies and the prohibitive cost of RAM. Thankfully, virtualization vendors such as VMware made huge progresses over the past 3 to 5 years, and the cost of RAM plummeted. Back in 1996, $10 would buy you 1MB of RAM. Today, the same $10 gets you 1GB, or 1,000 times more capacity for the same price. As a result, hardware virtualization became a powerful and cost effective way to deliver true multi-tenancy in a cloud computing environment, while allowing the use of components such as application and database servers that were never designed for multi-tenancy.