Get your FREE 30-day trial.
Start by selecting a product:
In this ‘digital first’ age, business leaders are demanding that many processes are transformed into digital experiences. From customer on-boarding, staff recruitment to customer communities, requests for custom applications are continually added to a long backlog of tasks for the CIO to deliver. All this, while trying to keep the IT lights on with budgets that keep getting tighter.
Enter cloud computing. Described as a ‘nexus force’ firmly entrenched in the enterprise technology agenda, cloud computing today represents a $180 billion market, according to research firm Gartner. Yet despite its massive size, the cloud has not delivered its full potential to many organisations. Yes, they are moving infrastructure and existing IT workloads to the cloud to reduce costs. But they are yet to tap into the true value of cloud computing – that is, in the application development layer, using Platform as a Service (PaaS).
PaaS offers a faster, more cost-effective model for application development and delivery, and is driving a new era of IT innovation and agility.Given these benefits, it is little wonder that Forbes declared 2015 as the ‘coming out party for PaaS’.
The Salesforce Advantage
The fundamental advantages of PaaS are speed, agility and cost. No longer tied to infrastructure, developers work with common objects, prebuilt integrations, and services for identity, mobility, authentication and collaboration to name a few.
Applications get built faster and are easier to scale based on demand.Take the Salesforce1 Platform. This cloud-based app development environment is architected to enable fast, collaborative development of business applications within a highly trusted and secure environment. According to research firm IDC,
Salesforce1 Platform customers experience:
They are building more applications and enabling greater innovation, while delivering 75-85% reduction in IT infrastructure costs.
How does the Salesforce1 Platform work?
To understand how the Salesforce1 Platform works, you need to view from an architectural perspective.
At the core of the Salesforce cloud platform is trusted multitenancy. The main advantage of multitenancy is that all Salesforce customers are always using the most current version of Salesforce. You don’t need to worry about upgrades – that’s Salesforce’s responsibility, and we take it seriously with three major upgrades delivered to customers each year. Cotinuous innovation is delivered as part of the service.
Multitenancy also ensures that every tenant receives the same trusted level of security. Security controls are delivered, typically in line with the most stringent financial services or public sector customers, and every Salesforce customer benefits from this investment. On top of the trusted multitenant architecture, Salesforce delivers a scalable metadata platform. Pre-built services include Objects, Mobility, Social, Collaboration, Workflow, Identity and Analytics. These are delivered as APIs, so you can integrate them with any other system within your organisation. Importantly, customisations are made through metadata, meaning that they don’t break as Salesforce ugrades releases from one to the other.
You can then build applications using rapid app development tools – either code or point and click based. If developers want to use programmatic code to deliver customisations, they can. Alternatively, system administrators or business analysts can use the declarative configuration environment to rapidly build and modify applications without the need for coding. Field level configuration changes are automatically made available to the mobile channel without the need for additional customisation or re-work. You can also leverage pre-built components to quickly access standard Salesforce functionality within your custom application.
Above all of this sits an open ecosystem of 2,700+ partner solutions. These range from lead scoring engines that complement our Sales Cloud, all the way through to industry specific Configure Price Quote functionality, and everything in between. You don’t need to build everything yourself – chances are one of our partners already have. Each of these can be seamlessly brought into your custom applications.Capping off the architecture is Salesforce’s market leading and complete CRM solution encompassing our Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Apps and Analytics Clouds – ready for you to use on whichever device you choose. All delivered in the cloud.
As the above diagram and the Salesforce architecture shows, there is much more to the cloud than meets the eye. It’s no longer enough to simply move infrastructure and existing workloads to the cloud. Rather, PaaS is about using cloud platforms to reduce the cost, time and complexity in building applications that deliver innovation to your business stakeholders.
So, yes, this cloud really does have a silver lining!
Learn more about the Salesforce1 platform
