Salesforce.com uncloaks Force.com 2

Salesforce.com today unveiled its Force.com 2 platform, with the addition of five new major services.

The first is Appforce, designed to deliver departmental apps at speed, allowing users to construct forms, customise reports and visually design business processes, all the while ensuring the apps can be measured and are auditable.

Then there is Siteforce, an on demand service designed to help users quickly build websites.

"It's a revolutionary way to build websites," said George Hu, executive vice president for platform and marketing at Salesforce.com.

Whilst showcasing the technology, Hu showed how the built-in content management system allowed for point and click editing and the ability to drag and drop features into a site, such as Facebook like' buttons or Twitter feeds.

There are some simple text and image edit features as well.

VMforce, meanwhile, stems from Salesforce.com's partnership with VMware and enables developers to create Java-based apps which are cloud-based and real-time, whilst supporting mobility.

ISVforce brings together a variety of services, including automatic upgrade functionalities, Salesforce.com's AppExchange cloud app marketplace and a real-time console for monitoring customer activity.

All of these features aim to support independent software vendors (ISV) such as BMC, which is already on board, Salesforce.com said.

Finally, the cloud company has integrated Heroku, a Ruby cloud app platform, into Force.com 2.

This follows the acquisition of Heroku, which was also announced at the conference today, and the new services with this will open up the Salesforce.com world to Ruby developers.

Heroku helps run over 105,000 apps for just such Ruby fans.

Talking about Force.com 2 at Dreamforce 2010 in San Francisco, Hu added: "It was based on the simple premise that if all our applications are moving to Cloud 2, then our platforms have to be there as well."

Cloud 2 services should offer next-generation apps that are social, mobile and real-time, according to Salesforce.com.

Force.com 2 has been built on top of Database.com, which was unveiled this week at Dreamforce as a standalone product.

BMC partnership

In a separate announcement, BMC and Salesforce.com extended their partnership with the announcement of RemedyForce, which will be powered by Force.com and has become Salesforce.com's soi-disant eighth cloud.

RemedyForce is another IT service management product and features designed to help administrators manage their cloud infrastructure, including a configuration management database to help locate the "single source of truth."

Bob Beauchamp, chief executive of BMC, took to the stage with his Salesforce.com counterpart, Marc Benioff, to explain the benefits of taking Remedy to the cloud.

"The Remedy platform for us is the industry leader," Beauchamp said.

"We've taken our knowledge of how customers use service management and put it on... Force.com."

Benioff said the addition of RemedyForce was "a huge step forward for the cloud."