At a private media and analyst event held yesterday in our San Mateo AppExchange incubator, we unveiled the charter incubator class of 32 partners and some of their early wins after just four months. It was a debutante ball of sorts.

The message of the day? Salesforce is the business and technology platform that is empowering the next generation of On Demand. The Salesforce platform and language let developers rapidly build new apps and functionality. StakeWare (one of the incubator partners), for instance, rewrote their sustainability risk management application in Salesforce in just a few weeks. This same application had taken them over four months of development time in Java. That's not even counting the many months and dollars it would require to set up all the servers, sharing infrastructure, web services APIs, and payment and billing infrastructure in order to then deploy it to real customers.

In yesterday's BusinessWeek article, entrepreneur Ross Mayfield describes it as "a commune for nerds."

For customers, what this means is more innovation much more rapidly. The incubators accelerate the pace at which the AppExchange ecosystem can target the needs of new markets, new verticals, and new regions. Case in point: neither of the two on-stage demos we had (Appirio and Kailea Networks) were related to CRM.

Moreover, customers will start to be able to attend tech talks, demo days and networking events at the San Mateo facility and other incubators being planned around the world. The AppExchange Incubators are like an "Apple Store for On Demand," a physical place where customers, partners, media, VCs, anyone curious can go to touch and feel the future of software. See you soon at an incubator near you!

Join us in welcoming the freshman class:

Alphabetically: Appirio, Avankia, BackWeb, Bluewolf, Business Objects, Centive, Clicktools, Cloud9 Analytics, Convenos, DomoDomain, Dreamfactory, Eloqua, iNeoMarketing, InsideView, InvisibleCRM, Kailea Networks, NextNine, OpenAir, OpSource, Pervasive, Portaga, Right90, RingLead, StakeWare, TwoConnect, VerticalResponse and Xactly.