Radical change is happening in every part of your life. We get our needs from social feeds, find places to eat based on ratings and recommendations, install apps with a tap of our finger, and that is just the start. Mary Meeker, partner at the top venture capitalist firm KPCB, calls this change the re-imagination of nearly everything. At salesforce.com, we see this radical change occurring in the enterprise every day. Gone are the days of sifting through emails, nightly loads of data from systems, and desktop computers. The world has gone social, mobile, and real-time. Companies are transforming themselves into social enterprises, and are re-imagining what it means to engage with customers and employees.

Developers too, are making a radical change how they build apps. Next generation apps are different. They must support the social, mobile, and real-time needs of the social enterprise. Simply moving existing processes, and apps, to the cloud just isn’t enough. They require new tools, technologies, and a platform for continuous innovation. Summer ‘12, the latest release of the Salesforce platform, is designed to enable developers to build these next generation apps today.

In our Summer ‘12 Release, we focused on a number of key insights for developers and IT departments:

Mobile & social are the dominant development paradigms

Every application design, and development should start mobile-first. Whether iPad, Android, or another mobile device, apps have to be instant-on, with real-time data pushed in. The Salesforce platform is designed for this radical new model of applications, has introduced new features in the Summer ‘12 release to support mobile app development:

• Native geo-location fields in database.com for location-aware apps
• A Schema Builder tool to drag and drop cloud databases with instant REST APIs within database.com
• Collaborate on any object within database.com with Chatter REST APIs - optimized for mobile devices

Enterprises require secure, real-time access to information

With over 54 billion transactions last quarter, serving more than 100,000 customers, and 300,000 custom apps, the Salesforce platform is built for social scale. Summer ‘12 provides the features needed to build secure, real-time apps:

• Innovative approach to streaming of data enables the creation of real-time apps without the need for monolithic middleware software stacks
• Connected Apps allows organizations to configure fine grained security controls for creation of trusted apps providers

Continuous delivery of apps through enterprise marketplaces

Enterprise customers require the same continuous delivery, and access to apps, that consumer app marketplaces provide. Summer ‘12 enhances ISVforce, the only unified solution for building, distributing, selling enterprise apps, with deeper integration into Salesforce AppExchange, the leading enterprise app marketplace, to make it easier than ever for ISVs to build and distribute their apps:

• Push updates ensure customers always have the latest apps
• Run Apex logic on install/uninstall provides a powerful way for ISVs to include custom configuration and setup of apps

It’s time to change how you develop apps. It’s your job to build the social enterprise. Summer ‘12 provides everything you need to get started now. Sign up for free, and begin building next generation apps today.