PALO ALTO, USA: Symphony Services, the leader in global product engineering services, announced a new initiative to help independent software vendors (ISVs) leverage Salesforce.com's award-winning Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to build the next generation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions for enterprise customers around the world.

Force.com, the world's first PaaS for business applications, is an integrated set of tools and application services that ISVs use to build enterprise applications and run them on the same infrastructure that delivers the salesforce.com applications.  A natural extension of the significant market momentum of PaaS in recent years, Force.com is the only complete technology stack that includes a scalable database, a workflow engine and user interface design tools.

All applications running on Force.com get built-in reporting and analytics, support for multiple languages and currencies and can be integrated with on-premises applications and Web 2.0 services such as Google Apps.

As a salesforce.com consulting partner, Symphony will leverage its award-winning software engineering capabilities and deep SaaS expertise to ensure ISVs can maximize the power of the Force.com PaaS to create critical business applications with the functionality, integration, point-and-click integration and scalability that has distinguished salesforce.com as a technology and market leader.

Glenn Gruber , associate vice president, strategic marketing, Symphony Services, said "Salesforce.com is one of the driving forces behind the SaaS movement and their Force.com platform offers a compelling vision for the future of software development for ISVs looking to create 'On demand solutions'. Becoming one of the first Salesforce.com consulting partners focused specifically on Force.com enablement marks an important milestone in our long and successful track record of creating SaaS solutions for independent software vendors. The combination of salesforce.com's market-leading SaaS solutions and our unparalleled product engineering expertise brings tremendous value to ISVs."

The SaaS market, which many industry analysts predict will grow to $20 billion by 2011 is rapidly changing the technology landscape as ISVs move from a traditional license based model to an on-demand one. Moving to a SaaS model, however, changes almost every aspect of the business, from pricing, delivery, sales structure and channels and the development of appropriate service level agreements (SLAs).