Leader: Can your IT department turn into an iPod?

At an event in San Francisco earlier this week, Salesforce.com's boisterous chief Marc Benioff unveiled his great new plan for the enterprise software market.

The idea: that by using standardised remotely hosted infrastructure, companies can free themselves from the nightmare of constantly building and integrating new applications.

In Benioff's AppExchange vision, companies will run on the same underlying platform - his.

Just as iTunes allows music lovers to download music from different labels, so in his vision companies could simply order up applications from their supplier and be confident they would run smoothly.

Because everyone is using the same standard infrastructure, developers won't have to worry about choosing which operating system to build their applications for, and so will be able develop applications faster.

Benioff says this will make Salesforce.com the iPod of the enterprise software market.

It's an interesting idea but it is not by any means certain that salesforce.com is the company to make this happen.

After all, despite its rapid growth, Salesforce is still a pretty small company - which means it might find it hard to achieve critical mass for its plans. Especially as Microsoft looks like it is heading in a similar direction.

And it may find it hard to push beyond its customer relationship management (CRM) roots, even though executives at the company argue it has simply proved its on-demand model using CRM, and can use the same model on any application.

On top of this, many companies believe in-house built systems are the best way to match IT exactly to their business needs.

But putting all this aside, the model favoured by Saleforce.com does have a lot of merits.

Outsourcing and hosted applications are becoming more attractive as a way of cutting out the complexity of IT - or at least giving it to someone else to deal with.

Increasingly, IT departments will become vehicles for the management of technology deals, rather than the people that actually build the applications.

Or, going back to Benioff's iPod analogy, this means the IT director will become some kind of master DJ.

So it could be that, in a few year's time, running the IT department becomes more about choosing the playlist and doing a bit of remixing - and less about playing your own instruments.