When I saw the lead sentence , I reached for my HP-12C . ” If the government gave your company $500 million to spend on building a new data center, what would you buy and how would you build it?” 500 [EEX] 6 [PV] 30 [n] 3 [i] 0 [FV] [PMT] If you gave me $500 million today, I could spend it down at a rate of $25 million a year, for 30 years (the age of the data center that’s now being replaced), assuming that I kept the unspent funds in a form that returned me annual after-tax yield of 3%…with $2,000 per work day left over for coffee and doughnuts in the break room. I believe my answer might therefore be, “I wouldn’t buy a data center at all.” Wait, it gets better: the same story says that the federal agency in question ” will need closer to $800 million to fund a new IT infrastructure, including the new data center-the physical building, power and cooling infrastructure, IT hardware, and systems applications.

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What Would You Do With A Billion?

One of the reasons I joined salesforce.com was because of their amazing philanthropic model . Salesforce.com encourages us to donate 1% of our working time to the community. In fact, salesforce.com even created an internal app to help employees find the perfect activity

Originally posted here: 
Give a little, Gain a lot

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is well-known for brash pronouncements and on Tuesday delivered his latest, calling for “the end” of traditional software maintenance fees.

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Benioff Calls for ‘the End of Maintenance’

Contact-information vendor Jigsaw on Tuesday announced Data Fusion, a cloud-based service that ties Jigsaw’s database with CRM systems such as Salesforce.com and automatically matches and updates contact records.

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Jigsaw Launches CRM Data Updating Service

Simple is better.

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Sweet, Sweet, Progress

There’s definitely a growing energy around the commercial opportunity of cloud computing – but where exactly will your company fit into the cloud? Do you plan on delivering services like custom application development or training?

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The Commercial Cloud Opportunity

Organizations today must consider many factors when choosing among cloud offerings from vendors such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com, but being able to port applications and avoid getting “locked in” to one cloud platform is critical, and must be a primary concern for anyone planning to move mission critical applications to the cloud. read more

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RightScale to Present at Cloud Computing Expo Europe in Prague

A number of partners and customers have commented that the Deploy Applications to Production Faster blog post has helped them greatly reduce the amount of time that they spend deploying apps to production. If you deploy applications to production using the Force.com IDE, you’ll want to check out that post

Originally posted here:
Force.com IDE 15.0.2 Now Available

There are several types of environments available to you while developing and testing on Force.com. This article provides an outline of these environments. It will discuss the various editions, best practices and design considerations, and recommend particular environments during the application life-cycle

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An Introduction to Environments

As a Force.com developer, you are probably already aware that before you can deploy your code into production, you should have atleast 75% test coverage. Though necessary (since the platform enforces this requirement), it is hardly sufficient to ensure that your code meets the requirements and expectations of the users. I will briefly describe the different types of testing you should consider before rolling out a Force.com application.

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Testing – it is more than code coverage….