Dell has reached a three-year deal with Salesforce to use the latter's Force.com development platform to build software for its "entire global workforce," according to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

The deal is the largest ever for Salesforce, Benioff said during the company's earnings call on Wednesday, according to a transcript. He did not disclose the financial terms.

[ Learn more about Force.com in the related story "Salesforce.com promotes development in the cloud." ]

The two companies had an existing relationship. Dell's IdeaStorm.com Web site is based on Salesforce's Ideas application, and the computer maker also uses the Salesforce automation system for its global sales team, Benioff said.

"We also have been working with some of their key software providers to port some of the applications that they have internally natively onto Force.com for them to use," Benioff said. "And all of that together, suddenly we were one of their key technology vendors and it really gave them the ability to sign what we call an enterprise license agreement with us."

Benioff did not specify whether the deal means Dell is replacing its entire internal tooling environment with Force.com, or merely intends to build applications for deployment enterprisewide.

Dell could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.

"Having a big hitter commit to developing on Force.com is really important," said 451 Group analyst China Martens. "Previously, those committing have tended to be SaaS SMB players like Centive or Xactly or midmarket, on-premise apps vendors looking to get SaaSy quickly, like Coda."

In the past, Dell has "talked proudly about not needing to rely on a third-party vendor's ERP, but creating its own apps," Martens added. "So I wonder if that might be a possibility, as well as the ability to tailor Salesforce CRM more to the needs of its sales reps."

A sizable customer like Dell could also help serve as a real-life test bed for Force.com development, Martens said.

Also on the earnings call, Benioff cited statistics about Force.com's overall uptake. The service now has 100,000 registered developers, about double that of a year ago, and Force.com has been used to develop more than 80,000 custom applications, he said.

In addition, Benioff discussed how Salesforce plans to help its developers work with other cloud computing platforms from the likes of Google and Amazon.

"You are going to see us offering our customers natively Google App engine and other cloud computing paradigms directly from our [application programming interfaces]," he said. "You see it already where some of our ISVs build the majority of their application in Force.com but maybe will reach out to [Amazon], reach out to Google App Engine or others. We're going to collapse that access into our API to make it as easy as possible for them."

Microsoft this week is proceeding with an update to Windows Vista and Windows Server, making available a beta-level service pack featuring capabilities for virtualization and power savings.

The company on Tuesday began offering the Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 SP2 (Service Pack 2) Beta release to MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will extend it to the public via TechNet on Thursday. Offering a single service pack minimizes deployment and testing complexity, Microsoft said.

Included in the service pack, according to the Windows Server Division blog, are Hyper-V bits in the release-to-manufacturing stage, meaning the bits are completed. Hyper-V is Microsoft's hypervisor-based server virtualization technology enabling multiple operating systems to run on a single physical machine. This enables workload consolidation across multiple underutilized servers onto a smaller number of machines.

Also highlighted in the service pack are changes to the power profile to yield more power savings. The service pack also addresses reliability and performance issues and supports new types of hardware. The 64-bit CPU from Via Technologies is supported and performance is improved for Wi-Fi connections after resuming from sleep mode.

"We are tracking to ship SP2 in the first half of 2009," said Justin Graham, senior product manager for Windows Server, in the blog.

With the release, Microsoft is looking for developers and IT professionals to have an early look at the technology and offer feedback. The beta is being offered via a Microsoft Customer Preview Program (CPP)

"The CPP is intended for technology enthusiasts, developers, and IT pros who would like to test Service Pack 2 in their environments and with their applications prior to final release. For most customers, our best advice would be to wait until the final release prior to installing this service pack," said Mike Nash, corporate vice president for Windows Product Management at Microsoft, in The Windows Blog on Tuesday.

"Windows Vista SP2 builds on the solid foundation of Windows Vista SP1, and represents our ongoing commitment to Windows Vista today," Nash said.

VMware released on Tuesday VMware View 3, new software aimed at providing desktop virtualization, application virtualization, and management of virtual desktops in one product.

VMware View is a reworking of the company's VMware Desktop Infrastructure product that adds other components to solve the problem of managing virtualized desktop environments, said Raj Mallempati, a group product manager of desktop products for VMware.

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VMware View is part of an initiative that VMware is calling vClient, which it unveiled at its VMworld conference in September. Mallempati said with the vClient strategy, VMware hopes to solve the "desktop dilemma" of not only virtualizing applications and desktops, but also managing and deploying those environments.

"At the end of the day, we also want to make sure we can provide end-users with a virtualized view of their desktops, applications and data," he said.

In addition to providing desktop virtualization, VMware View 3 includes View Composer, a new product that creates virtual desktops from a master image; VMware ThinApp, which simplifies application packaging and deployment to a virtual desktop environment; and Offline Desktop, which provides the ability to move virtual desktops between the datacenter and a local laptop or desktop. The product also includes Unified Access, which provides desktop administrators a single management platform for virtual desktops and applications.

VMware View 3 comes in an Enterprise Edition and a Premier Edition. The Enterprise Edition includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition, VMware View Manager 3, and Unified Access, and it costs $150 per concurrent user for a perpetual user license. The Premier Edition includes those products but adds VMware View Manager 3, VMware ThinApp, VMware View Composer, and Offline Desktop. It costs $250 per concurrent user for a perpetual license.

As virtualization of server OSes becomes more common, both VMware, which remains the leader in the virtualization software market, and other vendors are expanding their offerings to tackle the problem of virtualization desktops and applications that run on desktop computers.

Even though VMware remains the leader in virtualization across the board, the company has had a bumpy year in which it's faced its stiffest competition to date. Vendors such as Microsoft are building virtualization directly into their server OSes and are branching out into desktop and application virtualization. And in July, the company had a major executive shake-up, with CEO Diane Greene leaving suddenly to be replaced by former Microsoft executive Paul Maritz.

Oracle has contributed data-integrity protection code, partly developed with the hardware vendor Emulex, to the Linux kernel, the vendors announced Tuesday.

The code helps maintain "comprehensive data integrity" as information "moves from application to database, and from [the] Linux operating system to disk storage," according to a statement. It also lowers the possibility that erroneous data will get written to disk.

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The companies' effort is meant to help datacenter administrators track and address corrupted data quickly, lowering costs and downtime, said Scott McIntyre, vice president of product marketing at Emulex, in a statement.

Oracle and Emulex, which makes products for connecting servers, networks, and storage systems, are developing an early-adopter program that will help customers start working with the new features.

When a lot of information is moving through various aspects of a system very quickly, its integrity can suffer, said Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady. And at the same time, data integrity grows more vital as systems scale up, he added.

But improvements like the code contribution announced Tuesday are only "one piece of the puzzle," and will work in tandem with next-generation Linux file systems now under development, such as Btrfs, he said.

The Btrfs project, now available under the GPL open-source license, was first developed at Oracle.

Oracle is a key contributor, along with other large vendors, to the kernel project. The company makes money on Linux through its Unbreakable Linux support service.

Microsoft has released a new wave of Windows Live services that adds more social-networking qualities to its set of online services.

The company unveiled last month a plan to add Facebook-like qualities to its set of online services, which include e-mail, calendaring, instant-messaging, photo-storage, and sharing and collaboration services, among others. At the time, the company said the new services would be available to users before the end of the year.

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Microsoft first revealed the Windows Live brand for its online services and a plan for a major overhaul and to add new services in November 2005. The services are aimed at competing with Google by making Windows Live Web users' entry point into the Web and ultimately allow Microsoft to sell more online advertising.

The new version of Windows Live services lets people users have designated as "friends" see activities they are doing in other Web applications through Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, and other Live applications and services. The capabilities will be similar to the way Facebook allows users to be notified via e-mail or on its Web site about what their friends have been doing in the applications they use on Facebook, a feature called the "news feed."

To provide the new "activities" feature, Microsoft has partnered with popular third-party Web sites to link their applications with Windows Live, including Flickr, iLike, LinkedIn, Yelp, Flixster, Pandora, Twitter, Photobucket, and Tripit.

In addition to updates to existing services, such as Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Spaces, there also are several new services available to users with Tuesday's release.

They include Windows Live Groups, a service for letting teams, clubs or other groups of people collaborate and engage in online discussions; Windows Live Photos, a new photo-storage and sharing service; Windows Live Profile, a way for people to share information about themselves with more than 50 partner sites; and Windows Live People, which allows users to store and manage Windows Live contacts.

Users can access the new services online now.

Zoho, maker of an on-demand suite of business and productivity applications, announced on Tuesday CloudSQL, a new service that lets developers use the ubiquitous SQL to connect Zoho data with other cloud-based or on-premises applications.

SQL is a "pretty old" language but is also "pretty awesome," said Zoho's director of marketing, Rodrigo Vaca, in a blog post Tuesday. "It is by far one of the easiest and most efficient ways to query and interact with structured data. That's why it remains by far one of the most heavily used languages for business applications."

[ See how other Zoho offerings measured up in InfoWorld Test Center reviews: "Office killers pack some heat" and "Zoho CRM aims big, hits small" | Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Cloud computing has ushered in new methods of data retrieval and storage, leading to "improved, faster, and more responsive Web applications," Vaca added. "But while there are some SQL-like approaches for cloud computing out there, they tend to be fairly limited and not as powerful as the full-blown SQL."

CloudSQL supports a wide range of SQL variants, including ANSI, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and MySQL.

The service "serves as the bridge between the external application and the data stored inside Zoho. It receives the query in SQL, interprets it, delegates queries and aggregates results across the Zoho services," Vaca wrote.

The company has also developed a JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) driver and is working on an ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) driver. This means developers "can just continue using SQL drivers and statements as they already regularly interact with their premises-based databases using JDBC or ODBC drivers," Zoho said in a statement.

Initially, Zoho Reports, a BI and reporting service, will support CloudSQL. Other products, such as Zoho CRM, will support it down the road.

Zoho's announcement represents an attempt to win over IT specialists who haven't been quite ready to embrace the cloud-computing model, one observer suggested Tuesday.

"CloudSQL simply represents an incremental move that will enable Zoho to grow, extending a comfort blanket to nervous DBAs seeking reasons to resist relinquishing control over their data," wrote Paul Miller, a blogger who tracks trends in cloud computing and the semantic Web.

For now, CloudSQL is available at no cost. Zoho, which is a division of the Pleasanton, Calif., company AdventNet, will monitor usage and decide whether it needs to begin charging for it, according to a representative.

CloudSQL is somewhat unusual in that it lets users connect their Zoho apps and others in a free and broadly compatible manner, instead of forcing them to use a proprietary tool that carries a price tag, said RedMonk analyst Michael Coté.

"Access to data is the key problem for all these [cloud-based applications]," he said. "That's where the lock-in is, it seems, in such offerings. Whoever controls access to the data can control pricing."