The evolution of tech companies over the years and decades is something of interest to me, and Salesforce.com is in the midst of a change that I find particularly intriguing. Born as a CRM service company that happened to offer its functionality over the Internet, it has come to realize that perhaps its greatest asset is the virtualized infrastructure it built to provide those services to customers. The upcoming VMforce team-up with SpringSource is a big jump in that direction. The thrust of the announcement of that product involved integrating SpringSource-based Java apps with existing Salesforce.com setups; but VMware head Rod Johnson told Network World that you need not have any interest in Salesforce.com's CRM offerings:

"The absolutely killer app for it is where you have Salesforce data," and need to build enterprise-class applications that boost the capabilities of Salesforce while interacting with that data, Johnson says. "It will enable people to build applications and technology from anywhere and get excellent performance because it runs in the same data center. "But [VMforce] is certainly not limited to that," he adds. "It will also be capable of running general enterprise Java applications. You can go build any application you'd like and benefit from Salesforce's operational experience."

While obviously having more customers is good, I do wonder if this is something of a devil's bargain for Salesforce.com. They're essentially giving up virtually any kind of customer-facing role in this proposed ecosystem and simply providing the plumbing that the apps run on. And in fact Johnson says that this really should be the whole point of how apps are written for the cloud:

"As a developer, you shouldn't be writing any code that knows about a particular hypervisor ... You shouldn't really be writing code that knows about the infrastructure-as-a-service layer, period. If you're going to write a platform-as-a-service application, you absolutely don't want to have any knowledge in your application of hypervisors, or provisioning, because if you do that, firstly your application will end up more complicated than it was in the traditional enterprise, and secondly you do couple yourself to a particular technology stack."

Presumably, under this model if an offer better than that from Salesforce.com came along, you could just move your application over to it. But -- and here's where SpringSource wins -- you would have already written it with the Spring Framework, which is open source an will no doubt be adapted to many a cloud platform. People who already use Salesforce are probably locked in, but if you're just trying out VMforce because you're interested in Java cloud computing in general, you'd be much more likely to roam.