Enterprise businesses have complex needs involving many human, device, and increasingly machine interactions, often distributed across the globe. Allowing them to work together in an efficient and secure manner is no easy task, and as such, it is no great surprise that utilizing cloud-based software over the Internet has become so popular. High-grade security, scalability, and availability is high on checklists when choosing a new application, often followed by API needs and the ability to customize.

By developing on the Force.com platform, your application already has a good start. The http://www.trust.salesforce.com/ site provides a wide selection of industry strength, compliance, and encryption standards that are equally applicable to your applications. With this comes a selection of standard APIs offered in the SOAP and REST forms as well as the ability to create your own application APIs. In my view there is not a more integration-ready...