It's Not a Storm, it's a Salesforce Lightning

I’ve had the pleasure of coming to Dreamforce four times and this year has proven again why this is always a good idea. There is something special about sitting in a keynote in a crowd with 15,000 other Salesforce customers and soon-to-be customers. It is so special that I actually get goosebumps. This year was no exception and you may ask why?

As I looked around at my fellow Salesforce MVP’s I could feel the anticipation amongst us about the keynote. Over the past few days it became public knowledge that Marc Benioff would be announcing Salesforce Wave, the new Analytics Cloud allowing everyone to run detailed analytics using point and click. The biggest part of this is that it easily handles big data all within the Salesforce Cloud.

But I digress…

For me the more exciting announcement was Salesforce Lightning. Over the past few years Parker Harris has been quietly driving the development of a new platform which we now know is Salesforce1. With the new platform we get a lot of new tools and the first one out of the box is Lightning. Lightning will enable all companies to create their own mobile apps in a drag and drop manner.

You may ask “will we continue to use developers?” Yes we will. Developers will be building the components, which can also be reused across other apps, that your app will utilise as you build your app.

Traditionally you would engage a developer to do this just for you. But what if you could go to the AppExchange and grab the components you need? That is exactly where this is heading with the community “crowd-developing” the framework and those of us “non-developers” tapping into that pool to grab what we need. We then simply drag and drop those components using an app builder wizard and BAM! we have an app.

You know what that means? Yes that’s right it means that we all become developers!

Now that may not excite everyone but it does have significant benefits. The main benefit of Lightning is the ability to create an app and deliver to market in Lightning speed (see what I did there?).

We also no longer need to be concerned about building different apps for each different operating system such as iOS or Android as Lightning uses the Salesforce1 platform to deploy apps across multiple environments as well as easily displaying on any device regardless of OS or type of Device. Yes its agnostic and knows what device you are using and will behave the way you expect.

So does it get any better than this? I expect it will as we continue to see other enhancements rolled out from the Salesforce1 Platform, including a change to the Desktop UI, over time. For now I cannot wait to get my hands on Lightning and start creating some magic!

Jump on the Wave and get more on Lightning, straight from Dreamforce 2014 right here: