When reflecting upon 2011 decades from now, we might consider it to be the year the social enterprise became a business imperative. The year the social snowball effect could no longer be considered a fad. In fact, if salesforce.com’s platform growth in 2011 is any indication, this snowball is moving much faster than anyone could have predicted.

Check out the video we shared back at Dreamforce chronicling the actual growth metrics of custom and AppExchange apps built and installed on the Salesforce platform over the course of just one year...

Over that one-year time lapse:

• 3,000 apps were built or installed every 24 hours…that’s one every 30 seconds
• Our platform executes more than 650 million transactions per day…that’s 7,500 transactions per second
• And, even with this massive growth…platform performance time has been reduced to under 250 milliseconds

Other highlights as we close out 2011:

• Salesforce.com is the market share leader for public cloud application platforms, according to last month’s IDC report (Worldwide Public Cloud Application Platforms 2010 Vendor Shares, Doc #232170, December 2011);
• Salesforce.com was cited as a Leader in two Forrester Research Waves for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS);
• AppExchange crossed the one million install milestone, grew to more than 1300 available apps and launched a new marketplace for mobile apps; and finally
• Infoworld editors and reviewers named Heroku as one of its Technology of the Year award winners, noting that the platform is “currently leading” the race for developer mind share among PaaS offerings.

And, to set the tone for 2012, Heroku just celebrated its one millionth live app.

These aren’t just milestones…they’re just the beginning. All the credit goes to the vibrant platform ecosystem – the developers, customers and partners who are driven by the fact that the world of business is transforming dramatically, and that success is predicated on collaboration, rapid development, emerging technologies and innovation.

Here’s to an even bigger 2012 for cloud platforms!!