SweatInvestor Walter Roth blogged about Salesforce.com’s and VMware’s joint announcment: VMforce from his personal blog.  Below are a few highlights.

Notes: Salesforce and VMware announcement; VMforce

You can also watch the recording of this event at: http://www.vmforce.com

MC gets up to set the stage and to introduce the CEOs …

Just focus on your expertise. Someone who does Risk Analysis, should be able to plug in a Text Editor object. We’ve made great progress towards an “Object Store”, with things like AppExchange.

• IT is drowning in complexity
• We need to get people outside of the plumbing
• Answered how to write applications in a fundamental new ways, more efficient, open so its open to the future, etc.
• More than 2M developers are working with the SpringFramework
• Can we integrate that with the worlds of increasingly SaaS applications …
• To create a new trusted public cloud for these applications to run
• 91% of fortunate 500 run VMware …
• The SpringFramework app development …
• Salesforce built the leading SaaS network …
• They built it to be extensible ….

• We think we are all about to embark on this new exciting category
• You don’t have to look any farther than Social Networking
• In 2009 Social Networking surpassed Email
• Cloud2: new types of data and interactions; Social
• Facebook, feeds, push, profile, touching not clicking, smart phones and tablets and mobile, location being known or aware, next generation of user interfaces with Coco and HTML5 …
• Built on our application development platform Appexchange, and with our Chatter social application platform (Same functionality of Facebook, but built with enterprise integration, security, etc…)
• These features are now expected by every users (you can’t build an app without the ability to provide feeds that touch every mobile device, etc)
• Question: how can today’s java developers builds the next application in the cloud?
• Over 6M developers, #1 language, but Java developers don’t have a clear path to the cloud …We believe this gap must be filled
• No other companies can deliver this better than Salesforce.com and VMware
• The two together give a punch that will change the industry
• The trusted Cloud for Enterprise Java Developers
• VMforce: The Enterprise Java Cloud
• Developers will love it because they will be able to use Java for the first time with Force.com
• Java Developers will love VMforce because they’ll be able to write Enterprise class applications in the cloud 5 Times Faster at half the cost

• We are now going to show you what Mark just showed you
• Provides abstractions, simplifies code and decouples it from its environment
• Which means we can abstract away that we are deploying off an ugly old enterprise java server … to deploying in the cloud
• Our data (e.g., billions of contacts) is now available in Spring
• Java persistence object … (standard api)
• Creating a query for data in force.com …
• Any developer from Spring could query data in Force.com without knowing anything about Force.com
• SpringTravel (sample app we ship with Spring)
• Demo’ing the interface, search locations, find hotels, potentially make bookings, etc.
• The data is now persistent in Force.com
• Great example of how spring enables Java developers to take advantage of capabilities in Force.com …

• Time: 20 minutes in …
• Spring goes and finds the Chatter service…
• Looks similar, but up in the top right is a new link called “analytics:”
• Force.com has prebuilt in analytics as part of the platform
• Java developers can all get this without code …
• That’s a big deal … most developers will store data in a relational db and they have to build it themselves …
• Also adds profiles and feeds …

_

• The data is also talking, you can see my bookings …
  
• Now, this whole application is available on the iPad (every mobile device)
• From iPad user posts an answer to where he should stay on his trip
• Now its available to all these Java developers …

11:28 am (Back to the CEO’s)

• Will translate into great customer value
• A great CIO in our industry…
• Dave Smoley, CIO of Flextronics
• We’ve had tremendous success with VMware and Salesforce
• We gained tremendous speed, dependability, agility and cost benefits …
• We’ve made big investments in SaaS, and when I look how quickly we are able to react to customer demands in a low cost manner, its very compelling
• What’s the next step Dave?
• As a CIO, cloud is over used and hyped these days … but what I like is that you guys are really delivering …
• I want to see you guys continue to drive the openness, to continue to make it easy …. we have line monitoring tool …. one thing important to us is how effective and efficient is our equipment (millions of dollars per machine) … we have a java app deployed across our sites … today we need to install servers at each location … with this, we can put it in the cloud … thats how we’ll use tools like this …
• The easier it is to move things into Force and out of it … thats a great thing
• Wrapping up around 11:34 am

My Initial Thoughts

• I continue to be amazed at how fast “Feeds” will become a competitive advantage for apps and then anassumed requirement going forward
• I liked Salesforce’s commitment to embrace social technology, they had a twitter, Facebook, Aim, MySpace feed to the right of their online streaming of the event allowing it to be open and alive  despite some of the risks  (mixture of insightful comments, negative comments, clearly employee comments, etc)
• I wonder if there is opportunity to enable this type of functionality but allowing it to run behind the firewall completely or at least within the public cloud at providers like Rackspace or Amazon
• One tweet pointed out the interesting fact that Pricing was not mentioned, I did notice that the example application they showed (the travel booking one) had the use case of adding Chatter feed functionality internally … but didn’t open it up externally (if it were an external app, I wonder what the pricing would be to make it cost effective and if it would interfere with the internal pricing)

The full version is available at www.WalterRoth.com

Also covered by:

• Techcrunch
• more later …