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However, we have been busy. Over the last few months we’ve been working with our customers on many exciting initiatives to accelerate on-demand in the enterprise by capitalizing on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms that have now emerged from the likes of Salesforce.com, Google and Amazon.com. While these projects may be less awe-inspiring than actually addressing the issue of world hunger, they reflect that on-demand has become an option for both enterprise applications and general application "infrastructure."

One of the projects we’re really excited about is here in the Bay Area with Dolby Laboratories, a well-known brand and innovator in digital audio and video.

Dolby was kind enough to join us on stage with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at the Jan. 17 Tour de Force kickoff to demonstrate a proof of concept for a new digital cinema management system we’ve developed together.

Dolby Taps SaaS to Arm Customer Service Reps and Enter a New Market

Appirio experts built the proof of concept with the overall Salesforce.com platform, including Visualforce, the Apex programming language, the Salesforce.com database, and some interesting new Google APIs to generate charts and graphs.

The proof of concept highlights the power of development-as-a-service, as well as the potential of SaaS platforms like Force.com. Appirio and Dolby brought together the flexibility and lower overhead of on-demand software with the value of leveraging existing IT investments to show how to lower costs and adapt systems more quickly and easily.

The entire proof of concept took less than a week to design, develop, create and test. Using legacy on-premise platforms, it would have easily taken that long to get the hardware / software / network / security setup so we could begin – not to mention the effort to configure the database, create the logic and workflows, integrate it with external internet service and actually design and build out the user experience.

This is just one example of the interesting and innovative things we’ve been working on during these months of silence. In future pieces we’ll describe how to take advantage of on-demand applications and align them with emerging SaaS platforms to create an overall SaaS strategy for the enterprise.

Image from the Dolby prototype created with Visual Force