Building on the Cloud

Salesforce.com has helped build a group of certified Force.com developers on oDesk, making our marketplace one of the best resources for buyers looking to use Salesforce.com CRM solutions on the Force.com platform. And we’re hearing from the providers offering Force.com skills that being part of this latest certified group on oDesk is paying off as “cloud computing” reaches new heights.

Rakesh Aggarwal is a salesforce.com-certified developer in India who says demand for Force.com implementations has brought him a steady stream of customers since a buyer brought him onto oDesk last summer.

“I was already developing applications on salesforce.com when one of my clients insisted on working through oDesk,” he says. “After my first successful job through oDesk—now I insist that my clients work through oDesk!”

In its first three weeks, the salesforce.com/Force.com group on oDesk has grown to about 60 programmers. Jobs were already on the rise—a year ago, about 10 jobs involving Salesforce CRM were being posted each month on oDesk. Today it’s between 40 and 50. Rakesh says the technology has a lot of appeal. “I knew this was the future of technology because it’s the fastest, most trusted and most complete platform for building and delivering applications in the cloud.”

The cloud idea is simple—offering the full software platform as a service, so that the applications and data reside on the Internet (conceptualized as a cloud of servers), where a business can access them. This keeps in-house IT costs down and allows more flexibility and faster rollout of new services. Rakesh says a wide range of companies are taking advantage of the concept. “I’ve worked with individual developers who wanted to push their applications to Appexchange, and also with companies with more than 200 licenses, where they wanted to extend their business processes within salesforce.com.”

Rakesh has been working with salesforce.com technology for three years, since before the Force.com offering launched. He says that Force.com and oDesk have been a powerful combination for his business. oDesk lets him focus on his work as a developer, rather than on the hassles of being a one-man small business.

“I can manage my work much easier now,” he says. Which is good, because there’s more of it. “I had to go about searching for work earlier, but after couple of jobs here, I have been constantly getting work through oDesk.”

He says he’s even busier since joining the new salesforce.com certified users group. “It’s a great initiative, and it’s great to be part of this group,” he says. “After joining this group, the number of leads for salesforce.com projects has increased for me.”

While his profile offers other skills besides his salesforce.com expertise, Rakesh sees the Force.com platform as the critical focus, for himself and the buyers he’s serving.

“Cloud computing is a simple idea,” he says, “but it can have a huge impact on your business.”

Click here to see salesforce.com certified providers.
Click here to see all of oDesk’s sponsored groups.

One Response to “ Building on the Cloud ”

1. Building on the Cloud « crm like soft
   June 23rd, 2009 at 7:23 pm

Ex-Googlers behind new security service that flags

This story appeared on Network World at

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/061509-security-service-malware.html 

malware on Web sites

By Ellen Messmer , Network World , 06/16/2009

Sponsored by:

Security start-up Dasient debuted Tuesday with a cloud-based service designed to detect malware on Web sites and quarantine it away from visitors prior to it being removed.

Dasient’s three co-founders include two former Google employees, Neil Daswani, previously Google’s security product manager, and software engineer Shariq Rizvi, along with Ameet Ranadive, whose background includes stints at consultancy McKinsey & Co. and HP. (The new company doesn’t use job titles.)

How next-gen browsers tackle security

The Web Anti-Malware service that Dasient is announcing today makes use of Web crawlers and heuristics to automatically detect code that cyber-criminals have loaded onto legitimate Web sites in order to download malware or push visitors to fraudulent sites. As a consequence, victimized sites infected by malware often end up on “blacklists” of suspected dangerous sites compiled by Google as well as security firms, including McAfee, Symantec and WebSense, that have ways to watch for compromised sites.

It’s “a challenging engineering problem,” says Daswani of performing diagnostics on malware-infected sites and quarantining code without disrupting site use. The Dasient Web Anti-Malware service, which starts from $50 per month, is still in an “alpha” stage in some respects, especially the malware-quarantining capability, Dasient’s co-founders acknowledge. The malware quarantining feature requires a Dasient software module to be installed on a Web server for protection.

The goal, the co-founders say, is to assist Web site managers in finding out where the malware problems are before they’re on blacklists or to help them get off the blacklists, which disrupt business and drive customers away. The Dasient service can also be used by Web hosting providers to assist their customers.

There are millions of Web sites compromised each year. Family Communications, the Pittsburgh-based children’s media non-profit founded by Fred Rogers, found out how devastating it can be to end up on a blacklist because of infected Web pages.

“Four or five months ago we were alerted to the fact that Google results was saying your Web site may have malicious code,” says Kevin Morrison, COO at Family Communications, who said Google did send out an e-mail notice but didn’t seem to be in a position to do much more than that.

The phone started ringing off the hook with callers asking what was going on, and Morrison says his Web site hosting provider couldn’t really tell. Around the same time, Dasient contacted Family Communications to say it knew the site had been flagged by Google, they could help, and they did, showing exactly where bad code was embedded in Web pages, says Morrison.

“It had been hacked obviously,” Morrison says. “We got the malicious code out of the way and suddenly we’re OK on Google again,” says Morrison, who adds his company has continued to be an early user of Dasient’s Web Anti-Malware, though no more incidents have cropped up since.

Dasient retains close ties with Google — which itself faces many Web attacks daily, says Daswani — but the co-founders declined to provide more detail.

The start-up has received $2 million in funding from Maples Investment, Radar Partners, Stratton Sclavos and Eric Benhamou.