Platform › Scalability

The Force.com platform on which HealthConnect is built is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale as needed—from a few users to millions of page views.

Proven, real-time scalability

With a subscriber base that has grown to serve nearly 87,200 businesses, the Force.com platform has proven its ability to scale. Force.com now processes more than 10 billion transactions per quarter, more than half of which are through the API.

Mobile

Why traditional software doesn’t scale

With traditional software, developers make assumptions about how the application will be used, especially how people will organize their data. When all those assumptions prove to be true, the application tends to perform well. If those assumptions don’t hold true (or if the developer doesn’t make assumptions but only provides a set of configuration options), the app needs to be “tuned.”

However, the tuning is never done by the original developers, because that approach doesn’t scale. Instead, customers usually hire consultants who conduct a lengthy evaluation and education process, and then do their best to tune the app. Over time, the way the customer uses the app changes, requiring more tuning.

How the Force.com multitenant platform delivers scale

In a multitenant, cloud computing environment, there is effectively one platform that serves the needs of all customers. The developers who originally wrote the code can constantly tune the platform and even re-architect it based on real-world usage data. Compare this approach to on-premise software, where the developers never know how the platform is actually used.

The eVariant and Salesforce.com teams constantly monitor for performance issues related to activities such as database queries and search. If there is an issue, our performance teams evaluate it and then send anything in question directly to a development team. Frequently, the issue is addressed before customers even know it exists.

Because the development team is intimately aware of the application's real-world performance, we can significantly re-architect major subsystems to provide dramatic performance improvements.

Despite massive growth in the number of requests over the past few years—from about 500 million requests per quarter to about 10 billion requests per quarter—the average overall performance of HealthConnect on the Force.com platform has actually decreased—from an average response time of about 600ms to under 300ms.