Is Amazon the next Salesforce?

Recently, Amazon released its SimpleDB project into "unlimited public beta". Several months I read about this intriguing bleeding edge database effort by Amazon on Larry Keyes blog here, who thought this was an innovation to keep an eye on. As Frank Bell puts it in his review, SimpleDB is a "web service that simulates a database". Since Salesforce is a very successful web service that merely uses a database, I became more intrigued about what this might mean for databases of the future.

I like SimpleDB's departure from the relational database model. Typically, relational databases have a spreadsheet model, with rows representing John Smith's whole contact record, columns representing his various contact fields (title, street, city, etc), and cells holding his actual contact information. SimpleDB provides the ability to put attributes at the cell level - in other words, more than one piece of data in each box. So John's professional title "Director" might have the available attributes "Development", "Finance" and "IT". Other titles might have different attributes. SimpleDB is a web service, so we developers will build databases, then "call" them using one of many programming languages, such as Ruby, PHP and several others, from wherever we decided to host our applications. Nice! A new way for developers to build complex applications and not get bogged down in optimizing table joins and other mind-numbing tasks. Is this web 2.0 for databases?

The cost model is intriguing too. Pricing is similar to data storage services, which makes sense, since unlike Salesforce, you are not really purchasing an application, just a database with web services. Costs are per "machine hour" used, data transfer, and data storage. The free plan offers 25 machine hours and 1 GB of data transfer and storage. With the free plan, your developer could build a system that calls the database 2 million times a month. For many of us, this would be plenty. Add 10 cents per additional gig of transfer and 25 cents per gig of storage per month. Add 14 cents per additional machine hour per month. Cheap as chips, assuming your developer does not charge an arm and a leg for the application that actually makes the database usable by us regular folk. And so many possibilities for integration!

Amazon built it, but will developers come? Salesforce offers a wealth of resources, including most critically an Application Exchange where we can benefit from the labors of others to expand our database features. Salesforce enjoys the contributions of many developers targeted at features in demand from the nonprofit sector. It will be interesting to see who climbs on board, and how this might play out for the nonprofit sector.