Outsystems Platform and Force.Com Different Paas for Different Players

InComparison

OutSystems Platform and Force.com different PaaS for different players

An InComparison Paper by Bloor Research Author : David Norfolk Publish date : October 2013 Using cloud doesn’t necessarily (and shouldn’t) mean giving up control of your data and processing

David Norfolk OutSystems Platform and Force.com different PaaS for different players

Executive summary

This paper is about two different PaaS— ethos for end user computing. This is what Platform as a Service—solutions. In the PaaS could make Force.com popular—it’s busi- model, the cloud service customer creates the ness-oriented and Force developers should software it needs using tools and/or libraries not need to bother about performance, avail- from the PaaS provider. The customer also ability, security etc., all of which are supplied controls software deployment and configura- by the platform (although the effectiveness of tion settings; whereas the PaaS provider looks this probably shouldn’t be taken for granted). after the provision of the networks, servers, Adopting a single platform (basically, Sales- storage, and other services that support force.com) with a lot of pre-written and the software. Analysts such as Gartner are market-tested apps, and the choice of predicting a sharp rise in PaaS adoption, now writing your own apps with Force.com only if that people are more used to using cloud you really have to, is very attractive to large services and PaaS isn’t only available from organisations with a lot of sometimes over- risky start-ups. lapping, usually very expensive, point solutions to manage. One platform with the data OutSystems is a well-established supplier shared between apps should be a lot more of high-productivity in-house programming cost-effective. tools, maintaining a “small company” ethos and culture, even as it grows. According to its Salesforce.com is also big and stable enough ‘small book’ of employee guidance, “Every so for the risk—or the risk as perceived by a often you might see Paulo (Rosado, the CEO) company’s customers and partners, which roaming around the offices and asking people may be what is important—from adopting what they are doing. If he stops and asks you Force.com to be negligible. what you are doing he’ll probably follow up by asking you why you are doing it”. Saleforce.com thus offers an attractive story, particularly to intelligent business OutSystems sees an opportunity for the supply people without too much experience of, or of its tools as a PaaS development plat- liking for, the IT status quo. However, there form, an alternative to the Force.com PaaS is a reason for PaaS and public cloud solu- used to customise and extend the Sales- tions not yet being ubiquitous. At Bloor, we force.com platform. It believes that there is think that they may well be ubiquitous in a choice worth considering for Salesforce. the future, but that there are many barriers com customers in this space—and, of course, to overcome in the minds of many of those its tools can be used to develop standalone involved with the technical detail of business custom apps from the ground up, too. automation today:

Salesforce.com, vendors of Force.com, started • lock in to a particular supplier, even (or as a SaaS (Software as a Service) supplier of perhaps especially) one that is all-powerful cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship in its space; Management) solutions; but it now sees itself as a platform supplier—on which CRM is • possible difficulties with integrating a PaaS just one app. It is now becoming a “customer solution with on-premises legacy appli- company”, as it sees it: Alex Dayon, (President cations, which may still be critical to the of applications and platform, Salesforce.com) business; says that, “the next generation of enterprise apps are social with business data embedded • possible inflexibility, if the PaaS as supplied at the core and accessible from any device. doesn’t support precisely what you need With Salesforce Communities, customer to deliver the scalability, performance or companies can connect with customers, part- security you need for a specific applica- ners and employees in entirely new ways and tion (and always remembering that regula- from anywhere”. tions may dictate an on-premises solution on occasion); Force.com is its PaaS development platform for enterprise apps—it is becoming a capa- • the possibility, even, of not getting enough bility for developing rich socially enabled access, easily enough, to sufficiently gran- enterprise apps; but it developed out of ular PaaS services to enable rigorous Salesforce.com’s original “no-computing” testing.

Executive summary

These issues can be overcome, but this prob- Scope ably affects the choice of tool used for developing for the Saleforce.com platform or This InComparison is directed towards organ- extending Salesforce.com solutions. It is isations (typically, enterprises with existing important to remember that Force.com isn’t IT systems and some concerns around regu- the same thing as Salesforce.com and, for latory compliance) looking for a professional example, OutSystems Platform now delivers developer platform on which to modernise a new PaaS solution with broadly equivalent their business automation, with especial (but capabilities to Force.com on the cloud; but a not exclusive) reference to the Salesforce. solution that has grown out of a less cloud- com platform. It is intended to help decision- focused, on-premises, high-productivity makers decide which PaaS best fits their development platform, developed back when particular needs and culture. It is probably enterprises simply weren’t ready to embrace not much of a spoiler to suggest that Force. off-premises public cloud-based solutions com might be the right choice for an existing for critical business applications. Even today, Salesforce.com customer who is entirely most businesses are most comfortable with happy with it and has been using Salesforce. ‘hybrid cloud’—where parts of a cloud solution com since setting up in business. However, can be kept on-premise if necessary. Using it might well not be such an obvious choice cloud doesn’t necessarily (and shouldn’t) for a company that has little experience with mean giving up control of your data and Salesforce.com and which has a major invest- processing. ment in legacy in-house applications. In between, there’s a judgement call; which this There is no question in our minds that this paper should help its readers to make. OutSystems innovation is a timely one. The era of the silo’d IT shop is past and business It is important to remember that, at this success now increasingly comes from mini- level, an InComparison isn’t contrasting a mising time-to-market, using agile, app- ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ product. It is looking at based, user-centric computing. The cloud two products that are fit for some purpose; and PaaS fits the emerging business auto- to identify exactly what this purpose is, and mation model well—but businesses adopting to give prospective purchasers of the prod- these new paradigms still need and expect ucts enough information to help them decide choice. whether it matches their particular purposes or requirements.

Market for the high productivity PaaS

Both OutSystems Platform and (possibly to a PaaS is a category of cloud computing services lesser extent) Force.com are typical exam- that provides a computing platform and a ples of ‘high productivity’ development tools; solution stack as a service. Along with soft- they abstract away the complexity of conven- ware as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as tional (third generation or 3GL) computer a service (IaaS), it is one of the service models code, generating much of the routine parts for cloud computing. In the PaaS model, of an application from high-level declara- the customer creates the software using tive statements, leaving the developer free to tools and/or libraries from the provider. The concentrate on the high-value business logic. customer also controls software deployment The caveat with Force.com is due to its fairly and configuration settings; and possibly even conventional Apex programming language, the configuration of the application hosting which is used when things get more compli- environment. The provider provides the cated than usual. networks, servers, storage and other services.

People-centric business computing is coming This definition of PaaS is broadly in line with to the fore. People expect to be supported the NIST—see www.nist.gov—definition (PaaS by apps (often running on smart phones and is one of its three Cloud Service Models; tablets) that have the look-and-feel common along with SaaS; and IaaS). If readers wish to the social and entertainment apps that they to learn more about cloud service models, use in their daily life. These business apps we’d recommend Cloud Computing for Busi- aggregate the flood of information that over- ness, Chris Harding and members of the Open whelms most of us at work. They should help Group Cloud Work Group, Van Haren, ISBN people to make better business decisions, 978-90-8753-657-2. leading to increased business profitability and consequent rewards for the business (and its There are various types of PaaS offered by decision-makers). The apps differ from the the service suppliers; however, all offer appli- conventional multifunctional business application hosting and a deployment environ- cations that people are accustomed to using ment, along with various integrated services. at work, in that they mostly just do one thing, Services offer varying levels of scalability and but do it very well; and (most important) they maintenance. PaaS offerings may also include are available wherever and whenever people facilities for application design, applica- can use them productively, on personal tion development, testing and deployment as devices and, potentially, on the move, outside well as services such as team collaboration, the office. web service integration, marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, Of course, there’s a difference between a persistence, state management, application computer game which costs pocket-money versioning, application instrumentation, and and which you cheerfully throw away if it developer community facilitation. doesn’t work; and a business app which might cost petty-cash amounts to acquire but can Salesforce.com’s CRM application is now be instrumental in making business deci- seen as just one app running on a platform; sions that may make or lose millions for the Force.com makes this platform available as a company—and which may be subject to regu- service for developing other applications. CRM lation. Cloud, in general, provides a more is important, of course, but an organisation cost-effective and more agile environment for that wants to modernise its entire business new-generation app development and deploy- automation portfolio should look at more than ment (cloud deployment is cheap and effi- a platform’s ability to run CRM. For a start, cient; and if an experiment doesn’t deliver most successful organisations won’t be able the returns you expected, you can just drop to modernise their entire portfolio in one go it without having to dispose of the associated (there’ll be too much of it) and, indeed, there hardware). However, more than that, most may be no business reason to make a lot of businesses want to remain in control of the it more user-centric—conventional legacy IT software and data that runs their business applications may (or may not) be entirely effec- despite their adoption of the latest app-based tive for an organisation’s ‘systems of record’, approaches—to maintain good and trans- even if there are significant benefits available parent governance—and this should be part of from modernising ‘systems of engagement’ the service delivered by Platform as a Service (compare, for example AIIM’s Social Business (PaaS). Roadmap at www.aiim.org/futurehistory).

Market for the high productivity PaaS

So, organisations are increasingly looking for • Development experience platforms to help them build modern, effective, systems of engagement that can be »» Rich development environment (including delivered quickly and changed quickly. These remote debugging and process analytics), platforms will offer, ideally: enabling rapid delivery of custom apps (which themselves can be easily custom- • Platform characteristics ised and/or extended); and providing support for standard development envi- »» Choice of on-premises and public cloud- ronments such as Eclipse; hosted deployment and the ability to move between them at will (including hybrid »» Support for business-user development cloud implementations); as well as IT professional development;

»» Lots of existing and satisfied customers, »» Easy and effective integration with legacy showing that the platform is usable and applications—even including, e.g., main- effective; frame CICS and the like;

»» Integration with Saleforce.com (SFDC), »» Support for ‘just enough’ agile managed the de-facto market-leading CRM and process; e.g. DevOps. related apps platform; This provides a context in which we can assess »» An open, non-proprietary stack, accom- two different PaaS offerings with different modating both Java and .NET—with no backgrounds: Force.com and OutSystems lock-in to any particular vendor/platform; Platform.

»» Embedded performance analysis services and availability of process analytics services;

»» Extreme scalability and performance if needed (‘No Limits, No Bounds’).

InBrief, OutSystems, the product

Description desired (and shared where appropriate). For example, a company may choose to build and The OutSystems Platform is a high-produc- host an online application for energy usage tivity solution for the agile development and tracking, which its clients then pay to use— management of custom enterprise web and with each client’s data being securely isolated mobile applications. It allows development from the others even though the same phys- at the business logic level, with the platform ical database is being used (and without generating the conventional code needed for developers having to remember to put the deployment on the available technology. It ‘tenant’ in any database queries—that is done focuses on accommodating rapidly changing automatically by the Platform). business needs; scalability without arbitrary limits and with consistent ease-of-use, IT teams around the world have been using regardless of scale and complexity; and no OutSystems for years, to develop, deploy, vendor lock-in. manage and change web applications that are robust, ready to scale and based on standard It was originally delivered in 2001 for technology, ensuring no vendor lock-in. on-premises and then private cloud applica- OutSystems claims to have benchmarks tions; but is now also available as a PaaS, on showing that customers using the OutSystems the Amazon public cloud. Each customer is Platform deliver custom web applications isolated on separate servers in the cloud— around 10 times faster than they can with unrelated customers will never share servers other technologies and toolsets available in or databases. the market. OutSystems is thus a tried-and- tested solution, being made available as new Product effectiveness (architecture, perfor- PaaS. A key feature of this offering is that the mance, ease of use, fitness for purpose) same Platform that is available as a PaaS can be hosted in a private cloud, or on-premises, The OutSystems Platform is an agile platform, with support for hybrid build, test, deploy, which allows developers to create web appli- and hybrid application architectures if need cations using a Scrum-based methodology, be—so if a customer has security concerns, if desired. It can create both .NET and Java say, the whole application (or just its data) applications, using its database modelling can be brought back on premises or into a tools, in conjunction with a visual modelling private cloud, as appropriate. The cost for the language operating at a business logic level Amazon-hosted PaaS, private or on premise higher than either Java or .NET. platform is the same (the same pricing as it currently has for its on-premises-only model), Key technologies supporting OutSystems so that cost will not need to be a consideration Platform include IntelliWarp and TrueChange. when a customer chooses its usage model for IntelliWarp generates application elements OutSystems Platform. from application objects, which means that you can drop an Excel spreadsheet, say, into Stability and risk the platform and then use IntelliWarp technology to generate the logic, screen design OutSystems is a well-established and successful and flows needed to create a web application technology company with a significant user from the data—typically using HTML5 doctype and partner community. This bodes well for and constructs, and CSS3 for theming. company stability and risk; and its experi- TrueChange complements IntelliWarp; it’s a ence with precursors to OutSystems Platform change engine that automates impact analysis helps give us confidence that product risk is and, where possible, automates the removal low. As it has an established customer-base of any defects it finds. If this isn’t possible, it for these precursors, we suppose that drop- will automate the defect removal process and ping the PaaS if it isn’t successful would be alert developers to where the application has an option, but we really don’t think that that is been impacted by a change. very likely.

The Platform lets developers build multi- Nevertheless, OutSystems is a comparatively tenanted applications, securely and reliably. small company—compared to something like Such applications are deployed once but can IBM or, indeed, Salesforce.com. This has to service multiple customers or departments, have an important impact on its stability and keeping the data of each one separate where risk compared to such giants.

InBrief, OutSystems, the product

Support and coverage Value for money

OutSystems has a global presence in 24 Value for money is always a tricky call, since countries: including USA, UK and Ireland, it depends on the customers’ needs. A typical the EU, Japan, Australia, South Africa and customer might not need an expensive and Brazil. Perhaps, in part, due to its Portuguese unusual product feature and consider its origins, it has extremely strong localisation inclusion poor value for money; another and native language capabilities. customer might depend on that feature and think that its inclusion makes the product 8x5 or 24x7 phone support, email support, great value. and a Support Portal are available for Enter- prise edition customers. The OutSystems In general, however, we think the value for Support Portal (at http://www.outsystems. money of the OutSystems platform is good. It com/SupportPortal) allows paying customers has a simple licensing model, extensive capa- to: bilities and a reasonable charge per user per month (starting at $10), without arbitrary • Submit new support cases and track limits on what you can do. OutSystems does answers/feedback; not publish a price list.

• Access and review all support threads, in a central location, accessible by the whole team;

• Control the status of a support subscription;

• Define who is able to report and follow new cases on behalf of an organisation.

A strong online community is available for both Enterprise and Community editions and we think that the provision of support is first- rate—bearing in mind the size of the company.

The Forge, OutSystems’ code-sharing community, is smaller than Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and more akin to a free code- sharing site such as GitHub; it shares extensions of OutSystems Platform capabilities with other OutSystems Platform practitioners (e.g. developers), for free. It thus has a somewhat different aim and audience to AppExchange.

OutSystems, the vendor

Vendor background (albeit one operating on model abstractions), to build new apps. Introduced in 2001, the OutSystems Platform was originally developed in Portugal by a Competitors team led by OutSystems’ founder and CEO, Paulo Rosado. He now sees his company OutSystems Platform’s main competition is as “an international leader in cutting-edge probably from in-house development using approaches to the delivery of enterprise web conventional third-generation languages. and mobile applications” and is very proud There is a cultural change involved in moving of his company’s culture—see http://www. to high-productivity model-driven approaches outsystems.com/the-small-book/, a guide for and some people won’t want to make it. company employees. Beyond that, Force.com and the Mendix app Before OutSystems, Rosado was Executive platform are broadly comparable high produc- VP of Global Marketing at Altitude Software, tivity tools that compete in the OutSystems a CRM company present in 32 countries. space. Before joining Altitude, he co-founded Inter- vento, an e-business software infrastructure Partners company, acting as its CEO until the company was successfully sold in 1999. Previously OutSystems claims to have some 57 imple- Paulo worked in Silicon Valley for Oracle mentation partners and over 1500 certi- Corp, where he held multiple positions in fied platform professionals. In addition, R&D and Product Management. Paulo has the members of the Forge code-sharing participated in multiple Executive Education community can be considered to be informal programs, and holds a Master’s in Computer partners. Science from Stanford University and a Computer Engineering degree from Universi- Financial information dade Nova, Lisbon. OutSystems is a private company and its Customers investors include:

The OutSystems platform has over 36,500 • Espírito Santo Ventures (the venture installations across 22 different industries, capital wing of Espírito Santo Group, which has received multiple CODiE, CRN and JOLT provides financing, management support awards and is supported by an active commu- and market expertise to promising tech- nity of over 6,000 developers. nology-based companies with innovative products, services and business models and Customers choose OutSystems Platform high growth potential). because it is seen as a best of breed high- productivity platform, allowing fast develop- • Portugal Ventures Logo, which is a venture ment based on business logic rather than on capital and private equity firm, focusing its technology, on time and in budget. It provides investments in innovative, scientific and tech- an easy and intuitive multichannel services nology-based companies, amongst others. oriented architecture, enabling communi- cation between all relevant business stake- As a private company, OutSystems does not holders (internal and external). At the same publish its detailed financial information. time, it gives its customers a lot of control However, it has doubled in size in just the past over the platform and where things run. 2 years; has been profitable since 2007; and it has a strong cash position, which continues As Pedro Sousa Barreto, Global IT Digital to grow (it has no debt). It has a subscription- Marketing Architect at Bacardi says, based revenue model (so unhappy customers OutSystems Platform is the “perfect tool can leave fairly easily) yet it claims less than [if you want] to be able to forget about tech- 2% churn in 2012. In the past 12 months it nology and concentrate on the important has opened additional operations in Brazil, part of software solution delivery—the busi- UK, Singapore, Japan, and South Africa. As ness and its requirements!” That may well be private companies go, it seems to be a pretty true, but business practitioners still need the good bet. assistance of a skilled OutSystems developer

OutSystems, the vendor

Current issues

OutSystems’ biggest issue today, as a smallish (compared to Salesforce.com, say), originally Portuguese, company, is becoming more widely known in the general community. It seems well thought of by those that know of it; but we suspect that more people will have heard of Force.com.

There is also the issue that some converts to the Salesforce.com platform, and cloud computing generally, may see using OutSystems Platform as compromising the “purity” of their new Salesforce platform—unlike, say, that platform’s own development tool, Force.com. This isn’t a real issue—if OutSystems Platform is more cost effective in the long-term than Force.com and generates similar apps, while following Salesforce.com’s conventions, that should be enough—but in such cases, perception is sometimes all.

InBrief, Force.com, the product

Description the mobile space. It certainly has plenty of reasonably well-satisfied customers. Force.com is a multi-tenanted Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud offering hosted on It was born from a demand for customisa- Salesforce.com servers, on which developers tion of Salesforce.com implementations with build their own applications. The Force.com the addition of user-defined Tabs (Custom platform runs across many Salesforce data Objects in Salesforce terms). Producing public centres, with each customer’s data wholly facing websites requires Site.com (a content contained on one physical data centre (so the management system), which is an additional location of the live data is well-defined). The license cost. data centres are replicated for availability, which is good; but doesn’t address all risks Questions might arise as to its effectiveness to availability, and off-site replication (safer) as an IDE for general developers, who may be might compromise the physical location of the used to other IDEs, although it does support data. This could be an issue for the EU Data Eclipse and its Apex language is ‘Java-like’. Protection Directive, for example, and similar Issues might include support for team devel- directives worldwide, but (once Salesforce. opment and performance issues with Eclipse com finishes its EU Data Centre) we think this and it may not be entirely independent of should be addressed easily enough, with an Salesforce.com (missing functionality—as for appropriate service agreement. public-facing websites, above, for example— may have to be addressed by obtaining other Force.com is very much part of the Salesforce Salesforce.com products, at extra cost). family. It targets business developers who want to rapidly generate apps that reuse Nevertheless, for customers with complex and share data on the Salesforce.com plat- requirements for customer-facing applica- form, without much (if any) coding and with tions at scale and, currently, a large set of little desire to deal with the sort of configura- disparate and expensive point solutions, with tion and deployment issues that professional associated support and integration issues, IT developers are used to. Nevertheless, it moving everything to the Saleforce.com plat- has its own Apex language too, which allows form is very attractive. Force.com is the it to cater for professional developers (albeit obvious enabler that makes this possible; with less ease-of-use, possibly). Salesforce. people will want to use pre-written apps com also has another cloud platform, called wherever possible, but Force.com is the Heroku (not considered in detail here), which assurance that you will be able to build exactly accelerates deployment and lets you scale what you need whenever you can’t find some- easily. However, the languages it hosts are thing available as a pre-written app or a cloud traditional 3GL languages such as Ruby on service. Rails; it targets more technical developers, while Force.com Sites focuses more on high- We are sure that this assurance is justi- productivity development, with some abstrac- fied; but we do have some concerns that as tion from code. We are not sure how this complexity or scale increases, organisations multi-product approach offers any advan- may experience a discontinuity when the basic tages over providing a single, more general Force.com functionality needs to be supple- product—unless, possibly, you are going to mented with Apex coding. fall into one specific and precise category of customer for a long time. Support for hybrid (public plus private) cloud solutions appears somewhat grudging; Product effectiveness (architecture, perfor- and on-premises solutions aren’t really mance, ease of use, fitness for purpose) supported. This may cause problems for customers with onerous regulatory require- Force.com is the obvious choice for devel- ments, extensive and still-useful legacy opers who need to extend Salesforce.com systems—and/or conservative cultures. applications; including Salesforce.com end- user developers. In view of the product’s Stability and risk history (it was originally acquired as mobile application server and device-side client tech- Salesforce.com is very highly regarded for nology from Sendia) it should be particularly stability and financial success; and this useful for extending Salesforce.com apps into perception extends to Force.com. It is worth

InBrief, Force.com, the product

noting that Salesforce.com could prob- Value for money ably afford to drop or sell Force.com without materially affecting its revenues, but we Any reasonably well set-up PaaS is likely have no reason to think it might do this and, to be value for money compared to an indeed, this would make little sense in terms on-premise solution, because the overheads of keeping its customer community happy. of managing the hardware beneath the plat- Heroku is a fairly new (2010) PaaS acquisi- form are shared with other PaaS customers tion by Salesforce.com and might displace and provisioning/de-provisioning is made Force.com but it really targets a different kind easier. One concern with Force.com is the of developer and take-up by customers isn’t number of extra-cost services that might (or certain yet. might not) be needed for a complete solution. Other (paid for) Salesforce.com products and In short, Force.com is both seen as, and is, AppExchange appear to solve any issues, but low risk, both in the context of the survival of an enterprise-strength AppExchange app is its parent company and in terms of its own not usually free. Of course, if you are moving product risk. from an environment of poorly integrated, expensive, point solutions, this probably won’t Support and coverage be seen as much of an issue for you—running your Salesforce.com environment will still be Salesforce itself is well-regarded for it local- cheaper than what you had. Nevertheless, it isation (it’s been translated into some 16 may become an issue over time. languages) and, in 2012, it announced that it was building a European data centre, which Customers with extensive and long-term buy is essential to addressing EU data protection in to Salesforce.com will be most likely to concerns (this is being built by NTT Europe think of Force.com as value for money, we and scheduled for completion in 2014). Inter- think. In general, however, we think the value estingly, when we heard about this from for money of Force.com is less than that of Salesforce.com itself, it seemed to think that the OutSystems platform. A full-featured this was a specialist interest; but one of its version of Force.com is $25 per app per user customers who was present, indicated that per month on top of the Salesforce subscrip- the EU data privacy directives had, perhaps, a tion (note that this is for only 1 app; multi- wider impact than the Salesforce.com people app packages can be negotiated); and it has present realised - it saw the availability of an resource and other restrictions. The licensing EU Data Centre as an important enabler for model is fairly complicated, which might lead its use of Salesforce.com generally. to people paying too much ‘just in case’ and cheaper ‘light’ editions have serious restric- Support is available globally, from third-party tions on storage and feature use. partners as well as Saleforce.com, and all the expected options (such as 24x7 support and a strong online community) are available.

Force.com, the vendor

Vendor background The London Borough of Hounslow is a typical customer. It is using Salesforce.com and The vendor behind Force.com is Salesforce. Force.com to modernise its application port- com, the pioneer of Software as a Service folio, moving away from a focus on technology (SaaS) offerings for major commercial to a focus on business outcomes and on deliv- players. The company was founded in 1999 ering data into a ‘bring your own device’ and by Marc Benioff (a former Oracle executive). ‘bring your own app’ environment—which is Its sales automation software was originally mobile by default and fully supportive of social written by co-founders (and ex-Clarify devel- computing. It is responding to a need (dictated opers) Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and by government) to give citizens full but appro- Frank Dominguezas and it delivered its first priate and secured access to its systems (with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) an excellent user experience); but, at the same solution in 2000. time, it is saving money by sharing and reusing objects on the Salesforce platform and only The company was taken public (on the New writing new apps itself when really necessary. York Stock Exchange, stock symbol CRM), raising US$110 million. Larry Ellison of Oracle Competitors was an initial investor. The company has made many acquisitions, including mobile applica- Salesforce is still primarily a CRM vendor tion server and device-side client technology and (according to its 2013 Annual Report), company, Sendia; its technology has been it sees its primary competition as vendors developed and is now branded as Force.com. of packaged business software and companies offering CRM apps, as well as internally The headquarters of Salesforce.com is in San developed apps, enterprise software vendors Francisco, and it has an EMEA HQ in Morges, and online service providers—traditional Switzerland; Latin America and Caribbean enterprise software application and platform Headquarters in Mexico; and an APAC (Asia- vendors will become more of a threat as cloud Pacific) HQ in Singapore. It has global offices in computing takes off in the enterprise (if, or Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, when, it does). Italy, Finland, Swede, Belgium, The Neth- erlands, Denmark, Spain, Germany, Israel, Salesforce.com is big enough and acquisitive Australia, Japan, Korea, China, and India. enough that it might be competing with itself in certain cases— Heroku and Force.com look The Salesforce.com Foundation receives 1% like overlapping PaaS products, albeit with of the company’s effort, profit and time and different target customers. has given (or in 2013 gave) over $40 million in grants, donated over 445k hours to the High productivity cloud-development compa- community, and gave its services to over nies such as the Mendix App Platform and 17,500 non-profit organisations and NGOs. OutSystems Platform are only competitors to part of Salesforce’s offerings, are much Customers smaller companies, and probably do not figure highly as a threat, from Salesforce. In 2011, Salesforce.com claimed over 100,000 com’s point of view. customers and over 2 million subscribers. Partly this is due to the accessibility (easy Partners provisioning—and de-provisioning, if necessary) of its CRM SaaS offering and its wide Salesforce.com is the centre of a major apps support for localised offerings (it’s been infrastructure: Salesforce AppExchange, translated into some 16 languages; and, by which it describes as “the world’s leading 2014, it should have a European data centre, business apps marketplace” (although essential to addressing EU data protection Apple and Android presumably offer strong concerns). It also has a strong reputation as a competition). AppExchange gives Salesforce SaaS innovator (it’s been included in Standard customers a rich set of partner technology & Poor’s S&P 500 index since 2008) and is offerings to chose from, some of which are recognised (19th position in 2013) as one of available at no extra cost. the Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for; which helps to give potential customers confi- In 2013, Salesforce.com and Oracle announced dence in its offerings. a 9-year partnership in which Salesforce.

Force.com, the vendor

com will use Oracle Linux, Oracle Exadata, Oracle Database, and the Java platform to power Salesforce.com’s applications and SaaS platform.

Financial information

According to Salesforce.com’s Annual Report 2013 (http://www.sfdc- static.com/assets/pdf/investors/AnnualReport.pdf), the company is experiencing strong revenues (over $3 billion), growth (37% year-on- year) and has plenty of booked business (around $5.3 billion). Both Forbes and The Economist see Salesforce.com as an innovation leader. It is safe to say that Salesforce.com, the parent vendor of Force.com, is a very safe financial risk in 2013.

Current Issues

Perhaps Salesforce.com’s greatest issue is that it is sometimes seen externally as ‘just’ a CRM offering; which certainly isn’t the view from inside.

It also needs to maintain a reputation as ‘one of the good guys’, since reputation is a great part of inducing customer confidence in cloud and SaaS solutions. A potential issue is the spectre of lock-in. The Sales- force.com platform plus AppExchange is pretty open—as long as you’re happy to remain on the Salesforce.com platform and trust its ability to provide performance and scalability. If anyone lost confidence in Salesforce for any reason, moving a business dependent on Salesforce. com apps somewhere different might not be easy.

Data reference section

The numerical scoring of weighted capabilities which forms the detail of this report is contained in the Data Reference Appendix and summa- rised here in the form of spider charts (see Figure 1 and Figure 2 on the next page) with dimensions of:

• Product effectiveness -

»» Architecture: detailed info for choice of on-premises and public cloud-hosted deployment and the ability to move between them at will (including hybrid cloud implementations); open, non-proprietary stack, accommodating Java and .NET—no lock-in to any particular vendor/platform;

»» Performance: extreme scalability and performance if needed (No Limits, No Bounds); capability for rapid delivery of custom apps, which themselves can be easily customised and/or extended;

»» Ease of use: lots of existing and satisfied customers; rich development environment (including remote debugging and process analytics), support for business-user development as well as IT professional development; support for ‘just enough’ agile processes—DevOps.

»» Fitness for purpose: integration with Salesforce.com (SFDC), the de-facto market-leading CRM and related apps platform; embedded performance analysis and availability of process analytics; easy and effective integration with legacy applications— even including, e.g., mainframe CICS and the like;

• Stability and risk.

• Support and coverage.

• Value for money.

Note that we are just rating Force.com, not the whole Salesforce.com platform; whereas OutSystems Platform represents most of what that vendor does.

Data reference section

When reading these charts (and when reading Architecture the detailed Data Reference Appendix), 5.0 remember that, at Bloor, we are not inter- 4.0 ested in presenting marketing ‘eye candy’. Value for Money 3.0 Performance We are interested in scoring that shows the 2.0 potential for product improvement—score 3 (“feature/capability adequately satisfied”) 1.0 is an entirely respectable score. We believe 0.0 that all products are capable of improve- Support & Coverage Ease of use ment (as evidenced by the regular release of new versions) and you should not expect even a good product to score 5 (“innovative or outstanding implementation of feature/ Stability & Risk Fitness for Purpose capability”)—except, perhaps, in a few areas— as all practical implementations of a tool will fall short of perfection. Even a score of 1 Figure 1: OutSystems Platform, aggregated scores (“feature/capability not satisfied adequately or not included”) is perfectly acceptable if that is a feature or capability that you do not need. Architecture 5.0 This idea is extended in the weightings applied 4.0 to the scores before aggregation into the Value for Money 3.0 Performance charts: 2.0 • Weighting 100%: required feature/ 1.0 capability. 0.0

Support & Coverage Ease of use • Weighting 50%: optional feature/capability, nice-to-have (e.g. avoiding vendor lock- in, usually; as avoiding lock-in probably isn’t as important as getting the job done effectively). Stability & Risk Fitness for Purpose • Weighting 25%: less significant or seldom- Figure 2: Force.com aggregated scores used feature/capability (e.g. installation usually).

This addresses the fact a product should not be rated too highly for a brilliant and innovative implementation of a feature or capability that no-one needs or uses.

Summary

OutSystems has seen an opportunity for the OutSystems Platform has grown out of expe- supply of a PaaS development platform as rience with providing on-premises and private an alternative high-productivity development cloud solutions and targets professional environment to Force.com, for the Salesforce. developers. Its ease of use is consistent, even com platform. It believes that there is a choice with increasing scale and complexity, but to be made by Salesforce.com customers in (although accessible to a business analyst) this space. it generally requires the participation of a skilled OutSystems programmer. In addi- Salesforce.com is an extremely effective tion to its basic high-productivity capabilities and popular platform and Force.com is what (allowing development of business apps at the allows it to be customised to an organisa- visual modelling and business logic level), its tion’s needs. If you only have simple require- strong features are providing a rich developer ments, it is the obvious choice to complement experience, without limits, and with support a Salesforce.com strategy and it has the for change management and re-factoring; its power to cope with more complex require- capabilities for delivering a good end-user ments (using Apex programming), albeit experience; and the fact that it leaves control at some cost to ease-of-use. It is ideal for in the hands of the organisation employing it business analysts who want to create flows (its support for on premises and hybrid cloud, between web screens easily and quickly, as well as public cloud, deployments is an to create simple business logic (such as example). creating simple field validations or calculated fields, for example). Apex does its job Further Information of coping with more complex requirements adequately, but perhaps not much more than Further information about this subject is that; and governor limits in Force.com strike available from http://www.BloorResearch. us as a real nuisance (although they are prob- com/update/2182 ably what allows Salesforce’s message of “let us worry about performance” to work). It is worth noting that Salesforce.com is aware of the possible disconnect between the Force. com declarative world and the conventional Apex programming world and provides lots of training around building in the declarative world as much as possible; and about coding so as to avoid hitting its governor limits. Even so, in an ideal world, less training would be necessary.

Data Reference Appendix

Key:

• Score 1 - feature/capability not satisfied adequately or not included.

• Score 3 - feature/capability adequately satisfied.

• Score 5 - innovative or outstanding implementation of feature/capability.

• Weighting 100% - required feature/capability.

• Weighting 50% - optional feature/capability, nice-to-have.

• Weighting 25% - less significant or seldom-used feature/capability.

Intermediate scores and weightings are used in the context of particular products/environments/requirements.

Architecture scoring

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Multi-tenancy (note that With OutSystems, multi-tenancy means 4 Force.com uses multi-tenancy as a 3 50.00% what this means is product- building applications that are deployed way to securely host multiple unre- specific). Weighting reflects once but which service multiple lated customers and applications on the limited importance of this customers or departments, keeping the same servers and database (to keep to some users. the data of each one securely sepa- Salesforce’s costs down and provide rate where desired (and shared where scalability). appropriate) with the platform (not the programmer) ensuring that a database This implies that developers can build query retrieves only the appropriate data. applications which themselves offer multi-tenancy features to application Its PaaS isolates each customer by using users—but, on Force.com, this could separate servers in the cloud—unre- be a manual and error-prone process, lated customers never share servers or although Salesforce.com and its partners databases. provide extra-cost portal and community products for just these sort of applications.

On-premises options. OutSystems platform evolved out of an 4.5 No; but it is possible that the Oracle part- 1 100.00% Weighting reflects the impor- on-premises solution. nership could address this, at the cost of tance of this option for the ‘betraying’ Salesforce.com’s principles. enterprise. Public cloud-hosted option. Yes, hosted on the well-respected 4 Yes, hosted on its own platform, which 4.5 100.00% Weighting reflects the fact that Amazon cloud (customers won’t have to arguably makes for a better controlled this is key to the PaaS concept. interact with Amazon, they will manage solution; also, Salesforce.com is a the environment (and service) through pioneer and market-leader in public the OutSystems Platform). cloud.

Hybrid and private cloud The same platform that is available as 4.5 Salesforce.com fundamentally doesn’t 1.5 100.00% options. Weighting reflects the a PaaS can be hosted in a private cloud, believe in private clouds (see the importance of this flexibility to or on-premise, with support for hybrid Salesforce.com CIO quoted here: http:// the enterprise. build, test, deploy, and hybrid applica- www.cio.com/article/708458/Salesforce_ tion architectures as needed. A customer Concept_of_Private_Cloud_is_Funda- can bring it all back on premise or into a mentally_Flawed, in 2012). We have private cloud—or just host the data in a some sympathy with this view, but for private cloud. many companies today, private cloud (or on premises options) are required (sometimes for regulatory reasons). There are signs, in 2013, that Salesforce is rethinking this position, as part of its new Oracle partnership.

Data Reference Appendix

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Ability to move between clouds Supported, to an extent. If the customer 2.5 Limited to the Salesforce.com cloud 1 75.00% at will. Weighting reflects the cares to host on Terremark or another platform. fact that this is an important IaaS, OutSystems can accommodate option but that it is difficult to that, although the ‘turnkey’ offering is on provide in the current state Amazon. of cloud maturity and that customers can live without it— for now. Open, non-proprietary stack, OutSystems Platform is architected for 4 Visualforce and Apex are proprietary 2.5 75.00% accommodating Java and extensibility; it forms a layer on top of an languages that run on the Force.com .NET; and no lock-in to existing coding environment and provides platform only; and you can only export particular vendor/platform. graceful ‘stepdown’ to standard 3GL database entities as CSV (comma delim- The weighting is higher than languages such as C#, Java, JavaScript, ited) files. Importing entities as CSV files we might ordinarily apply to SQL, CSS, etc., as appropriate. Standard introduces potential problems with refer- lock-in, because the PaaS SQL can be used for database queries ential integrity. This all implies a strong is managed by an external and integration with Oracle and SQL degree of lock-in to a particular (albeit a vendor. Server databases is supported. This very large, stable and ‘safe’) platform. means that lock-in shouldn’t be a serious issue (OutSystems’ visual language isn’t standard, but it is accessible and easy- to-read; although moving from a high- productivity platform to conventional 3GL coding is never going to be trivial).

Licensing model. Weighting Simple licensing model. 3.5 Complex licensing model with limits on 2.5 100.00% reflects the impact of unrea- file and data storage per subscription, sonable licensing models. API calls etc.

Performance scoring

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Responsiveness of UI. Seems adequate in general use. 3 Seems adequate in general use. 3 25.00% Weighting reflects the fact that, provided it is adequate, this is unlikely to be important to anyone that isn’t using both products. Resources needed while Handled by PaaS. 3 Handled by PaaS. 3 100.00% running. Weighting reflects the impact of an unpredictable and unmanaged ‘resource hog’ application. Performance monitoring, OutSystems Platform applications 4.5 Salesforce.com monitors performance 3 75.00% including embedded perfor- perform asynchronous logging of every- internally and ensures a very high service mance analysis and availability thing that has the potential to affect level (so performance of a given appli- of process analytics. Weighting application performance (e.g. execu- cation is usually acceptable). However, reflects the fact that not tion times for queries, web service calls, the developer isn’t expected to monitor everyone cares; rating is in the extensions, painting a web screen, performance in detail—Salesforce’s context of a developer-oriented etc.). Service Centre then enables the mantra is “Let us worry about perfor- platform rather than an end- reporting (and filtering) of these applica- mance”. The browser-based Developer user platform. tion elements at a granular level. Console has a debugger that provides some visibility into the execution times of code being debugged but not overall performance monitoring capabilities, nor the ability to monitor an application’s performance over time.

Data Reference Appendix

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Scalability, run time and OutSystems Platform enables you to 4 Salesforce.com controls where your 3 100.00% software limits. Weighting scale horizontally without limits, and code runs as well as the resources allo- reflects the disruptive impact provides the flexibility to determine cated to it and Force.com is perceived by of limits—when you hit them where a piece of code should execute. customers as fully supporting scalability. unexpectedly. This may give it an edge on high load Force.com monitors performance inter- systems as it provides control over hori- nally, and provides a multi-tenant archi- zontal scalability—on the other hand, tecture that can scale horizontal and there is an extra opportunity to get things vertically. Although the platform scales wrong (there’s a particular risk that opti- as Salesforce adds hardware, that does misations, including where code runs, not mean your code will always execute aren’t revisited when circumstances as quickly as you would like, and you change). OutSystems Platform doesn’t don’t have the option to add hardware to have intrinsic runtime and software improve performance. Salesforce places limits, which seems, to us, to be very limits on your use of the platform’s useful. shared resources with ‘Governor Limits’ that developers need to be aware of—see https://login.salesforce.com/help/doc/ en/salesforce_app_limits_cheatsheet.pdf (this list was even longer in the past).

Ease of use scoring

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Lots of existing and satis- Yes (but we have seen evidence that very 4 Probably has more satisfied customers 4.5 100.00% fied customers. Weighting small customers sometimes feel they than any of its competition. reflects the importance of the are becoming less important; OutSys- customer. tems seems aware of this and has plans that could help address it). Skill profile required. OutSystems Platform is targeted towards 3 For simple apps, only Business Analyst 3.5 25.00% Weighting reflects our opinion the developer, but the developer does skills are required (and training on that obtaining required skills not require fluency in object oriented/ Force.com). is a once-off process that an web programming technologies in order enterprise expects to cope to become a competent OutSystems For complex apps, competence in building with. Platform practitioner. web apps, and training in Visualforce (an HTML-like mark-up language for building web pages) and Apex (a Java- like language required to build the page controllers). Fluency with object oriented/web programming technologies and (especially) accommodating the Force.com governor limits is needed.

The higher score given to Force.com reflects its accessibility to business analysts for simple apps. Learning curve. Weighting The OutSystems Platform’s visual 4 Visualforce and Apex are similar to HTML 3 100.00% reflects the fact that acquisi- modelling capabilities accelerate the and Java, respectively, and can be quickly tion of new developers is a learning curve for all users, without assimilated by a programmer with expe- continual process; they need requiring a foundation in object oriented/ rience in those languages. However, to learn even if they come web programming as a prerequisite—or since Apex runs in a multi-tenant envi- provided with reasonably the need to architect solutions to avoid ronment, Salesforce places limits appropriate skills; and the governor limits. The visual model also on your use of the Platform’s shared impact of developers without provides an intuitive way to communicate resources via ‘Governor Limits’ (https:// the necessary skills can be application logic and screen flow that login.salesforce.com/help/doc/en/sales- significant even if they’re only is accessible to both programmers and force_app_limits_cheatsheet.pdf) and you active for a reasonably short non-programmers. must design your solution to anticipate time. and avoid hitting these. This design work requires additional time and additional test methods, but does not contribute to solving the business problem. This is probably more an issue for technical developers, used to complete freedom, than for end-user developers (and may, in fact, be a good thing for undisciplined users without training and experience in developing with shared resources).

Data Reference Appendix

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Rich development environ- Good support for team-based develop- 4.5 Supports IDE based development (using 3 100.00% ment (including remote debug- ment (note the OutSystems Platform the Force.com plug-in for Eclipse; ging and process analytics). Visual Merge capabilities, for elimi- although, allegedly, deploying via Eclipse Weighting reflects the fact nating conflicts between two developers can be slow sometimes) as well as devel- that this is the fundamental changing the same code). opment using a browser-based IDE. customer objective for these products. Strong debugger enables the debugging Very good support for (required) unit of UI attributes as well as code. testing and Apex (only) debugging. Robust sandbox capabilities (a sandbox Analytics available for development can replicate data as well as application process. elements).

Limited support for team development and managing conflicts between programmers. Support for ‘just enough’ agile Support for DevOps is built-in on the 4 Salesforce does not offer full DevOps/ 2.5 100.00% processes—DevOps (auto- OutSystems Platform; and APM imple- APM functionality. It supports the full app mated integrated code-build- mented with LifeTime (which gives you lifecycle, using external tools. Neverthe- deploy), Application Portfolio full visibility of the application versions less, Force.com does have extensible Management (APM), develop- running in all your environments—devel- templates and developing process with ment life-cycle management opment, QA or production). OutSystems these is one engagement model it uses etc. Weighting reflects the Platform supports the full app lifecycle. with customers. importance of process; and the potential impediment from too much process. Data model complexity. Copes better with complex data models. 3.5 Easy to use for simple data models; less 3 100.00% Weighting reflects the, often IntelliWarp provides wizard-like assis- so for complex data models. Wizards overlooked, importance of tance with coding for complex data provide assistance for new users but easily understanding data models. It has a good visual schema Force.com provides little assistance once structures. Note that the builder. you cross the threshold that demands scoring reflects ease-of-use Visualforce and Apex. However, it does —even the best product can’t have a good visual schema builder. make complex data models entirely easy to use. Programmer coding aids. Includes a particularly rich set of 4.5 Yes. 3 100.00% Weighting reflects the impor- programmer coding aids, including: tance of programmer accept- auto-complete (type-ahead) when ance of a development tool. entering expressions, hierarchical context-sensitive item picker within the expression builder, graphical based query builder, query tester, context- sensitive help.

Its TrueChange engine deserves special mention. This automatically refactors or ‘heals’ existing code (e.g. if you rename the CompanyAddress field to BillingAd- dress, it will automatically modify your entire code/model appropriately). This extends high productivity from ‘building’ applications over the whole change and evolution lifecycle. Knowledge transfer. Weighting Visual modelling makes knowledge 4 Force.com does not have significant 2 75.00% reflects the importance of this; sharing across business and technical knowledge transfer capabilities; although although it isn’t recognised domains easier in itself. In addition, Salesforce.com does provide good as a necessary feature by all OutSystems’ OutDoc facility provides training courses. organisations yet. javadoc-like capabilities. All worthwhile, and OutSystems has Use Cases where college-level interns became useful programmers in a couple of weeks (using video tutorials and a bit of mentoring) but not really an advanced knowledge- transfer capability; which would include, e.g., an ability to learn expert actions and replay them as guides (or training) for novices.

Data Reference Appendix

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Searchable tags. Weighting OutSystems Platform does not include 1 Force.com supports a built-in tagging 3 50.00% reflects the fact that not tagging as a standard capability with its feature: searchable free-text tags can be everyone will need this. applications, although it can, of course, added to Salesforce Objects. be coded on a case-by-case basis and there’s even a Forge component to help (http://www.outsystems.com/forge/ component/30/tags/). Built in reporting functionality, Not provided. 1 Simple reporting displaying up to 2000 3 75.00% adds considerably to ease of records is built in easy to use. We wonder use±if your reporting needs a bit about the impact on ease-of-use can be accommodated. The when a report evolves to display more weighting reflects this. than 2000 records.... Business logic and work- Business logic is modelled visually and 3.5 A visual workflow modelling tool allows 3.5 100.00% flow The weighting reflects is therefore easily communicated to business analysts to create flows the fundamental importance others, but will generally always require between web screens easily and quickly, of being able to deal with the the participation of a skilled OutSystems to create simple business logic. complexity of business logic Platform practitioner. easily. Things get more difficult with complex However, ease-of-use is consistent as logic, where Apex coding is needed, so applications scale. the level of ease of use is not consistent across applications, which can cause problems when users cross complexity boundaries. User interface design. Consistent ease-of-use for general UI 4.5 Easy for simple applications using the 3 100.00% Weighting reflects the impor- requirements; strong and easy-to-use standard UI; less so when Apex/Visual- tance of UI to the end-user. user experience features. force coding is required. Installation process and PaaS – n/a. 3 PaaS – n/a. 3 25.00% complexity. Weighting reflects the fact that this is a once-off thing. Availability of product editions, Available in Enterprise Edition for 3 Force.com is available in three Editions: 3 25.00% with differing capabilities. medium/large companies and free One App, Enterprise and Unlimited, Weighting reflects that this can Community Edition, with limited func- which, amongst other things, have make planning for adoption tionality. Most OutSystems deals include different governor limits. easier but is otherwise fairly service customisation, which may blur unimportant. the differences between editions. Demo licenses. Weighting A free 30 day trial of OutSystems PaaS is 3 Free 30 day trial offering available; 3 25.00% reflects that this can make available. Developer Edition is free for devel- planning for adoption easier opers (see www.salesforce.com/assets/ but is otherwise fairly The Community Edition is free for evalu- pdf/misc/salesforce_Developer_MSA. unimportant. ation and personal use. pdf): you may not use this for production purposes; if you are a direct competitor; or to monitor the availability, performance or functionality of the Developer Services; or for any other benchmarking or competitive purposes.

Fitness for purpose scoring

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Integration with Salesforce. It is designed to integrate. 4 Force.com is part of Salesforce.com. 5 100.00% com. Weighting reflects the fact that Salesforce is a key target environment.

Data Reference Appendix

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Easy and effective integra- OutSystems Platform copes well with 4 Integration is accomplished via web 4 100.00% tion with legacy and other synchronous web service calls if they are services or via pre-built connectors applications—even including, needed and if integration of existing code supporting selected data sources. Also e.g., mainframe CICS and the via web services is not an option. many vendors that provide integration like (i.e. legacy modernisation middleware have built connectors for capabilities). Weighting reflects Integration Studio can wrapper existing Salesforce.com and can access Custom the importance of reuse of code for integration with new systems, in Objects. legacy to many cost-conscious a way that gives it a particularly strong organisations. legacy modernisation story. Force.com can wrapper existing code using an integration partner; although, depending on the source application, further work may be required.

The new Force.com Canvas feature provides a way to host external web- based applications within a placeholder panel in a Salesforce / Force.com application, and for this to access the outer context of the Salesforce application and make requests of it.

Force.com has an edge when it comes to existing integration components. The AppExchange (http://non-exchangeable) provides an unmatched set of existing components. Data model complexity. OutSystems Platform is targeted towards 4.5 Business Analysts use a web-based form 2.5 100.00% Weighting reflects the impor- the programmer (although it is acces- to create entities, relationships, calcu- tance of supporting real- sible to more technical business users), lated fields and Excel-like formulas. life data structures for many so it copes very well with complex data From this model, Force.com effectively organisations. models, by eliminating associated coding generates standard show, edit and list tasks. screens and the associated CRUD logic. If the standard, generated UI (or the basic CRUD logic) for a complex data model doesn’t meet requirements, then a programmer is needed to build the solution, using Visualforce and Apex. Data protection issues. Dependent on the underlying Amazon 4 When Salesforce opens its EU data 3 75.00% Weighting reflects the impor- implementation; customers can choose centre in 2014, it should be able to tance of these in EU (and a deployment region (US East or West, handle the EU Data Directive well; and it other) localities—but they Ireland, Singapore or Sydney). If this isn’t is in control of its own platform. don’t apply universally to all fully compatible with data protection applications. constraints, customers can mix public cloud environments with an on-premise data-centre or private cloud, at the same cost. Business process and busi- Strong visual workflow modelling tool; 4 A visual workflow modelling tool allows 3 100.00% ness logic. Weighting reflects but not BPMN compliant. business analysts to create flows the fact that this is a key capa- between web screens easily and quickly, bility for these products. Business logic is modelled visually and and to create simple business logic is therefore easily communicated to (creating simple field validations or others, but will generally always require calculated fields, for example). the participation of a skilled OutSystems Platform practitioner. Not BPMN compliant and complex business logic in Force.com applications must be manually coded in Apex Triggers (along with associated test methods). Business logic cannot be ‘intuited’ without an understanding of object oriented programming concepts (e.g. classes and methods), increasing development and maintenance costs.

Data Reference Appendix

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Availability. Weighting reflects Dependent on the underlying Amazon 4 Salesforce has at least as good a repu- 4 100.00% the importance of having avail- technology. The basic product doesn’t tation for availability as Amazon—see ability choices. have multi-availability zones capabilities http://www.salesforce.com/assets/pdf/ (it relies on Amazon’s default availability), datasheets/SevenStandards.pdf. but customers can opt-in to a (fixed price per month) ‘high-availability option’ with apps automatically deployed to multiple availability zones in the same region. Timers and batch scheduling. Supports development of unlimited 4 Supports development of asynchronous 3 100.00% Weighting reflects the impor- asynchronous processes (such as batch processes, but (apart from scheduled tance of the availability of jobs). Provides visual modelling of these reports) these must be developed using asynchronous processes. processes. Apex (and associated test methods) and are further limited by the platforms governor limits. You can only have twenty-five batches scheduled at any one time and only five batches may run concurrently. Mobile development. Weighting OutSystems Platform provides flexibility 3.5 Salesforce Touch is a mobile container 3.5 75.00% reflects the increasing impor- and productivity when requirements similar to Apache Cordova (formerly tance of mobile; although it is demand pure mobile web applications Adobe PhoneGap) that supports not universally needed. and its Go Mobile Initiative facilitates deploying native, HTML5 and hybrid apps the addition of mobile capabilities (for to any mobile device. The Mobile/Touch Android, iPhone and Windows Mobile) and Salesforce Chatter App fully support to an existing Web application—based custom objects and apps these days with on its IntelliWarp and TrueChange no further development required. If a technologies. customer user experience is required using native, HTML5 or hybrid tech- However, OutSystems Platform has no nologies, there is a suite of SDKs and offline/native capabilities. templates for developers at www.devel- operforce.com/mobile. Web interface design. The UI generated by IntelliWarp is fully 4.5 The standard, generated interface has 3.5 100.00% Weighting reflects the impor- modelled in a rich WYSIWYG environ- two-columns of label-field pairs. You can tance of this to developers. ment. It can be customised without reorder fields, or choose not to display writing code and has a strong user expe- them, but deviating from the two-column rience focus. The IntelliWarp accelera- format (or relocating a field label) tors generate simple CRUD screens, fully requires coding in Visualforce and Apex. modifiable by drag and drop in the editor The standard list screen allows in-line but it also has the flexibility to create any editing and you can reorder columns kind of complex HTML based interface using drag and drop. You can create very easily. custom list screens that filter data based on user-definable criteria. Email design. Weighting OutSystems Platform claims to be able 3.5 Supports creating HTML formatted email 3 50.00% reflects the fact that not to create “aesthetically superior emails templates that can incorporate data from everyone needs email design. without manual HTML coding”. the Salesforce database. Salesforce provides a rudimentary template editor that isn’t as sophisticated as the best email designer tools. Re-factoring. Weighting OutSystems’ Service Studio automati- 4 Support for Platform level re-factoring 1 100.00% reflects the importance of cally refactors the model as you make is on the roadmap but there’s no delivery this capability for developer changes, and TrueChange ensures that date. For now, simple renaming of productivity. you do it correctly. classes, object or fields remains a significant effort. Name spaces can be nested Also known as packages or modules and 3 Not currently available in Apex, as far as 1 50.00% and provide a context for an available on the OutSystems Platform to we can see. identifier (i.e. its scope), which help manage large applications. helps manage large projects. Weighting reflects the fact that not everyone needs this. Impact analysis. Weighting Impact analysis is provided by OutSys- 4 Force.com will, in certain cases, simply 1.5 75.00% reflects the importance of the tems’ impressive LifeTime facility. prevent you from making a change (such availability of impact analysis as a re-factoring attempt). It does not to maintenance and change, communicate the impact of a change. although not everyone will use it.

Data Reference Appendix

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Security. Weighting reflects The OutSystems Platform provides role- 3 The Force.com platform offers good 3 100.00% the importance of security based application security and requires role-based security. Salesforce has a to enterprise application the use of an additional security token very strong set of security credentials environments. (appended to the password) when access ensuring that records/data, even at the occurs via the API. SSO is supported field level, can only be seen and changed via OAuth or SAML. The Platform also by users with the appropriate permis- provides basic auditing features including sions. This is defined declaratively using storing: Created_By and Last_Modified_By role hierarchies, user profile permissions users, login history, field history tracking and more granular record sharing rules. of selected, and logging modifications to These things are also exposed via Apex the configuration. for more sophisticated programmatic based sharing rules. These features support, e.g., Chinese Walls implementations in investment banking, where record visibility is determined by role, product, geography, coverage and other dimensions. Social computing. Weighting OutSystems Platform does not include 1.5 Force.com applications are automatically 4 75.00% reflects the fact that not social applications; but this could be Saleforce.com Chatter enabled. everyone will need social remedied using 3rd party applications computing, although its and the Chatter or Yammer APIs. importance is increasing; the weighting was increased to reflect the anticipated importance of this in the future. Testing. Weighting reflects the Developers can use their usual preferred 3.5 Force.com enforces test coverage; 3 100.00% importance of the availability of testing tools and methodologies; the production deployment requires that support for testing; it is scored Platform manages code dependencies at least 75% of any Apex code in the from the PoV of technical and encourages developers to focus their application is covered by test methods developers. tests on business functionality (with unit (which involves also creating test data). or integration tests). This should ensure This may be seen as a barrier to rapid fewer barriers to deployment and lower deployment by professional developers, test maintenance. OutSystems Platform who’ll need to learn new testing tools generates standard HTML, JavaScript, and methodologies for Force.com, but is SQL and .NET or Java, but developers probably a valuable QA enforcement for usually prefer to test at the model level, end-user application development and a rather than testing generated code, necessary consequence of the way Force. since this is a more productive use of com works. It appears that developers resources. have to resort to third-party testing tools (which are available for the platform), for simulating end-user use of applications. Language support. Weighting Has its own visual high productivity 4 Has point-and-click declarative features, 3 100.00% reflects the increasing impor- declarative language—but you can easily such as workflows and approval tance of declarative languages link in procedures written in standard processes, that suffice for a lot of busi- and of dealing with the range third generation languages and it gener- ness logic but it has its own strongly- of languages in use in most ates standard HTML, JavaScript, SQL typed, Java-like, object-oriented established organisations. etc. programming language that lets you centralise and execute flow and trans- action control statements on the Force. com platform in conjunction with application calls to Force.com APIs; web service requests and database triggers on objects can also initiate the execution of Apex code.

Data Reference Appendix

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 UI design. Weighting reflects OutSystems Platform has a strong 4.5 Every Force.com app has a standard user 3.5 100.00% the importance of UI design to user experience story, including: Built- interface with one or more page layouts business end-users. in support for grid layouts; automated that correspond to the app’s objects. optimal spacing, based on extensive However, you can also develop custom research on visual design best prac- UIs with Visualforce, a web-based tices; immediate preview, providing a framework for developing sophisticated, perfect rendering of how the user inter- custom UIs for Force.com desktop and face will look in the browser, without the mobile apps using native Visualforce need to compile and run the applica- mark-up and standard web develop- tion; enhanced mobile pattern support, ment technologies such as HTML5, CSS, by generating HTML5 and CSS3, a rich JavaScript, and jQuery. interface can be achieved on any device, using controls native to the device; real- time user performance monitoring. Database triggers and stored OutSystems Platform can support these 2 Force.com doesn’t support these 1 25.00% procedures. Weighting reflects but their use isn’t recommended. (but its Apex triggers provide similar the fact that supporting these functionality). isn’t a necessity. Development of public-facing It is easy and comparatively inexpen- 3 The add-on Site.com enables the 4 75.00% websites. Weighting reflects sive to publish a public facing site on publishing of public-facing websites and the increasing importance the OutSystems Platform but there’s no includes a web-based CMS. It is expen- of building public-facing out-of -the-box CMS. sive (around $1500 pm) but effective. websites. Change and configuration OutSystems supports full-function 4 Force.com takes a similar approach 3 100.00% management/development. SCM including rollback (and automated to many development tools: download Weighting reflects the impor- database schema changes are non- a package to work on, make changes, tance of this capability for destructive too, so rollback also puts then merge back into the main reposi- enterprise development. the database back to the right schema); tory, with text-based conflict resolu- visual change conflict detection and tion. However, synchronisation of a test resolution (merging) between developers. sandbox environment with production is only once a month, which compli- cates things. We have seen a Salesforce training PDF for its change management processes that indicates that they should be effective; although though they do seem to concentrate on the developer silo a bit and neglect configuration (as opposed to change) management. However, such issues are getting beyond the scope of this paper. Application field changes audit. A change history facility is available as a 2.5 Supports storing change history for up to 2.5 75.00% Weighting reflects the impor- component in the Forge and would need twenty fields per object. You must desig- tance of audit-ability to enter- to be designed into the application— nate fields for change history tracking, prise computing. which is flexible and specific to the appli- when you create the field/object. You cation needs, but is extra work. cannot designate this feature after crea- tion and this is useful but it isn’t full A simple system change log is largely configuration management. inappropriate in a high productivity environment, but OutSystems Platform has There is also a System Change log, which good change logging facilities. is development focussed and provides a complete change history for any declarative or programmatic changes made by the Salesforce administrators.

Data Reference Appendix

Stability and risk scoring

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Vendor stability; weighting OutSystems has a long and respectable 3 Salesforce.com is big and stable enough 5 75.00% reflects the fact that a good history in high productivity development for the risk—or the risk as perceived by product will probably survive but doesn’t have Salesforce.com’s repu- a company’s customers and partners, loss of its vendor. tation in cloud and is a much smaller which may be what is important—to be company. negligible. Vendor product risk; weighting OutSystems could drop PaaS from its 3 PaaS is pretty fundamental to what 3 100.00% reflects impact of forced offering and continue with its on-prem- Salesforce does, but it could probably migration from a product. ises option, but has no obvious need to. afford to drop Force.com, although it is unlikely to. Partner ecosystem; including OutSystems has a strong partner 3 Salesforce.com, behind Force.com. Many 4.5 100.00% third-party developers devel- community but it’s a smaller company partners (e.g. Oracle) and AppExchange oping for the platform as well supporting fewer relationships and is a huge source for third-party apps. as formal B2B partnerships. OutSystems Forge is nothing like as big Weighting reflects the impor- as, say, Salesforce AppExchange. tance/stability implied by a strong partner ecosystem.

Support and coverage scoring

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Support availability (24x7 vs. 8x5 or 24x7 phone, email and Support 3 A wide range of support success plans 3 75.00% working hours). Weighting Portal available for Enterprise edition. are available, including 24x7, both from reflects the increasing impor- Salesforce.com and from partners. tance of 24x7 working in enterprises. Global support (in-country Has a global presence in 24 countries: 3 HQ’d San Francisco, with an EMEA HQ 4 100.00% offices/support staff). including USA, UK and Ireland, the EU, in Morges, Switzerland; Latin America Weighting reflects the Japan, Australia, South Africa and Brazil. and Caribbean Headquarters in Mexico; increasing importance of and an APAC (Asia-Pacific) HQ in Singa- global enterprises. pore. It has global offices in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Italy, Finland, Swede, Belgium, The Nether- lands, Denmark, Spain, Germany, Israel, Australia, Japan, Korea, China, and India. Online support and support Strong online community, available for 3 Extremely large and active online 4 100.00% community (note that a bigger both Enterprise and Community editions. community. community is good but it may equate to more communica- The OutSystems Support Portal (at http:// tion noise). Weighting reflects www.outsystems.com/SupportPortal) the increasing importance of allows paying customers to: submit new online and community support, support cases and track answers/feed- even in Enterprises. back; access and review all support threads, in a central location, accessible by the whole team; control the status of a support subscription; define who is able to report and follow new cases on behalf of an organisation. Partner ecosystem. Weighting The Forge is smaller than AppExchange 3 AppExchange is similar to Apple’s App 4 100.00% reflects the importance and more like a free code-sharing site Store and provides access to thou- of a partner ecosystem to like GitHub; it shares extensions of sands of free and subscription apps, customer confidence in a plat- OutSystems Platform capabilities with largely CRM and Salesforce Automation form; it offers some guarantee other OutSystems Platform practi- focussed. of stability, non-vendor support tioners (e.g. developers), for free. It has a and stability. somewhat different aim and audience to Saleforce.com has a huge partner AppExchange. program and claims thousands of part- nering companies. OutSystems claims some 57 implementation partners and over 1500 certified platform professionals.

Data Reference Appendix

Value for money scoring

Score Score Feature/Capability OutSystems Platform Force.com Weighting 1–5 1–5 Cost per user (note that to OutSystems has tiered pricing but does 4 The Enterprise license for Force.com is 2.5 100.00% integrate with Salesforce.com, not publish a price list. At 500 users, $25/app/user/month (for full read/write both solutions require a per OutSystems Platform is $10/user/month access to Salesforce.com)—see http:// user license for Salesforce. with no apps or objects/app limits. www.salesforce.com/crm/editions- com, in addition to the PaaS pricing-platform.jsp. Only one app/user license). There is a 600k ‘software units’ limit at is covered but multi-app bundles can be this tier, which OutSystems explains is negotiated. the equivalent of 1,000 pages and 500 tables, across as many apps as you want A cheaper ‘light’ $10 /user/app/month to build. subscription is available, for basic, entry-level apps, without sharing and fine grained access control; APIs for advanced integration with legacy and 3rd party systems; and real-time data feeds. Estimation of value add—diffi- Does what Force.com does, more or less 4 Best suited to adding value to Salesforce. 3 100.00% cult to assess in absolute equally well; but supports non-Sales- com installations. terms as it depends on what force custom apps (built from scratch), the business needs. Weighting non-Salesforce and more complicated reflects the importance of environments and needs rather better, value added in addition to cost. without add-ins. Cost of flexible hosting options. The cost for the Amazon-hosted PaaS, 4 Doesn’t currently offer cloud-hybrid-on- 3 50.00% Weighting reflects the fact private or on premise is the same—and premise flexibility—which is one way of that not everyone needs such the same pricing structure is used for keeping costs down. flexibility. the premise-only model. It is intended that cost will not need to be a consideration when choosing the appropriate way to utilise the OutSystems Platform. Free or extra cost ‘add-ins’ for Many re-usable components, oriented 4 Other well-integrated Salesforce.com 3 75.00% developers. Weighting reflects towards the more technical developer; products are available (often fairly the fact that, although they can usually free, on Forge. expensive) and a rich set of re-usable be very useful, not everyone components for the business devel- will want them (scoring is in oper are available on AppExchange; not the context of technical devel- necessarily free. opers’ needs). Built-in reporting (the impact OutSystems Platform has no built-in 1 Usable reporting facilities, accessible to 2.5 25.00% of this on value for money will reporting or social computing features. any user, are built in. depend on whether the devel- They can be added easily enough but that oper needs to develop a lot of needs at least some extra effort. Tabular, Summary, Matrix and joined simple reports displaying less reports can be created quickly, but are than 2000 records or not); and limited to displaying only 2000 records. integrated social computing. If you need to display more than 2000 Weighting reflects the fact that records, you can export records to Excel. not everyone will have a need To meet complex reporting requirements for these features. you will probably need to use a third- party reporting tool (for example, Crystal Reports) that supports Salesforce.com.

Force.com applications are Chatter-enabled.

Bloor Research is one of Europe’s leading IT David Norfolk research, analysis and consultancy organisa- Practice Leader tions. We explain how to bring greater Agil- Focus Area: Development/Governance ity to corporate IT systems through the effective governance, management and leverage David Norfolk first became interested in com- of Information. We have built a reputation for puters and programming quality in the 1970s, ‘telling the right story’ with independent, in- working in the Research School of Chemistry telligent, well-articulated communications at the Australian National University. Here he content and publications on all aspects of the discovered that computers could deliver mis- ICT industry. We believe the objective of telling leading answers, even when programmed by very clever people, and the right story is to: was taught to program in FORTRAN. His ongoing interest in all things related to development has culminated in his joining Bloor in 2007 and • Describe the technology in context to its taking on the development brief. business value and the other systems and processes it interacts with. Development here refers especially to automated systems development. This covers technology including acronym-driven tools such as: • Understand how new and innovative tech- Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Integrated Development Envi- nologies fit in with existing ICT invest- ronments (IDE), Model Driven Architecture (MDA), automated data anal- ments. ysis tools and metadata repositories, requirements modelling tools and so on. It also covers the processes behind them and the people issues • Look at the whole market and explain all associated with implementing them. Of particular interest is organisa- the solutions available and how they can be tional maturity as a prerequisite for implementing effective (measured) more effectively evaluated. process and ITIL (v3) as a framework for automated service delivery.

• Filter “noise” and make it easier to find the David is a past co-editor (and co-owner) of Application Development additional information or news that sup- Advisor and associate editor for the launch of Register Developer, and ports both investment and implementation. is currently executive editor for GEE’s “IT Policies and Procedures” product. He has an honours degree in Chemistry and is a Chartered IT • Ensure all our content is available through Professional, has a somewhat rusty NetWare 5 CNE certification and is the most appropriate channel. a full Member of the British Computer Society (where he is on the com- mittee of the Configuration Management Specialist Group). Founded in 1989, we have spent over two dec- ades distributing research and analysis to IT His early career involved working in database administration (DBA) and user and vendor organisations throughout operations research for the Australian Public Service in Canberra. Da- the world via online subscriptions, tailored vid then returned to his UK birthplace (1982) where he worked for Bank research services, events and consultancy of America and Swiss Bank Corporation, at various times holding po- projects. We are committed to turning our sitions in DBA, systems development method and standards, internal knowledge into business value for you. control, network management, technology risk and even PC support. He was instrumental in introducing a formal systems development process for the Bank of America Global Banking product in Croydon.

In 1992 he started a new career as a professional writer and analyst. Since then he has written for many major computer magazines and various specialist titles around the world. He helped plan, document and photograph the CMMI Made Practical conference at the IoD, London in 2005 and has written many industry white papers and research reports including: IT Governance (for Thorogood), Online Banking (for FT Busi- ness Reports), Developing a Network Computing Strategy and Corpo- rate Desktop Services (for Business Intelligence), the Business Implica- tions of Adopting Object Technology (for Elan Publishing).

He has his own company, David Rhys Enterprises Ltd, which he runs from his home in Chippenham, where his spare moments (if any) are spent on photography, sailing and listening to music. Copyright & disclaimer

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