Those of us on the Platform side of the salesforce.com house tend to focus exclusively on application development, sometimes overlooking the mass of subscribers for the standard Salesforce CRM application.  But, as this blog from Gartner CRM analyst Michael Maoz illustrates, the CRM crowd is starting to understand the power of the platform.

Maoz attended the recent Dreamforce conference in San Francisco to hear and speak about CRM, and he came away highly impressed, stating that he felt "more excitement about the possibilities of business applications than I have felt at a vendor conference in the past ten years."

But Maoz very astutely (IMHO) also picked up on the larger picture – "The real story is the around how Salesforce.com is sinking roots and
tendrils into multiple areas of business: by using Force.com to build
business applications."

You can create powerful business applications that extend and compliment the core CRM capabilities of Salesforce, as well as using the Force.com platform to build robust standalone applications.  It warms the cockles of a platform guy’s heart to see the message spreading to another constituency.