VMware and Salesforce team up for enterprise apps

VMware and Salesforce have joined forces in an attempt to woo the six million Java developers out there towards the cloud.

They are today launching "VMForce" which will see the two companies offer a cloud based developing environment that can also take advantage of the salesforce.com database and management tools.

In an interview with IT PRO, Tim Barker, senior director of EMEA product marketing at salesforce.com, said: "VMForce is going to give enterprise Java developers a path to the cloud."

"We have seen people using cloud based services as development environments or as testing environments [but] we don't see many people building or running enterprise class Java applications."

He added: "We think there is an opportunity with VMForce for these six million plus developers to give them a trusted, secure, proven environment in which they can create and run these applications plus take get the productivity advantages that you can get by using the components in our force.com infrastructure and platform."

The product will offer VMware's Java development stack, with the Eclipse product it picked up during its acquisition of SpringSource back in September, and allow users to "drag and drop" it onto the salesforce.com platform.

Dave Wright, vice president of technology at VMware in EMEA, told IT PRO: "The fact that it will now be running in the virtual environment means [developers] get rid of all of the hassle they have had in the past with performance and scalability by nature of the VMForce hosted environment."

"They get rid of all the problems of availability and security because this is a trusted and tested platform to run it so what we are hoping isa new market place for people who are Java developers, who are able to run what they have created in a world class enterprise virtual environment."

Although the announcement has been made today, it is only the website with details on how to get on board that will go live. The product itself will not arrive until later this year.

"I think chief information officers want some time to adjust to these things," said Barker. "We are expecting to have a lot of interested people and we have created this VMForce.com site which is where, come launch, people can go to sign up and learn more about it."

But even though the product hasn't arrived yet, the companies are both confident they will get a lot of developers on board.

"We are looking at an ecosystem of six million java developers so of course we are not expecting to get all of them on day one," concluded Barker, "but I think this is about creating a new market [and] opening up that market of Java developers with two trusted providers that are really going to create, or hopefully change, the cloud computing industry."