For 15-plus years, Salesforce has defined the cloud computing space. Companies big and small depend on our technology to drive business processes and better connect to customers.

To really understand what sets Salesforce’s cloud apart from other cloud providers, you need to take a closer look at the Salesforce1 Platform on which it sits, and more specifically, Force.com.

As a next-gen Platform as a Service (PaaS), Force.com serves as the foundation for the Salesforce products you know and likely use on a regular basis, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, and AppExchange. Force.com is many things: fast, scalable, customizable, secure, and reliable. And it supports more than 100,000 organizations and two billion transactions per day.

How Force.com Works

How do we do it all? The answer is Force.com’s metadata-driven software architecture and the way that innovation powers multitenant application development. Multitenancy is kind of like an apartment building. Residents get the benefits of sharing the main framework, but still have the privacy they want, thanks to walls and doors.  

We at Salesforce were actually the first to use a combination of groundbreaking technologies specifically designed for clouds with multitenancy. This unique infrastructure means IT doesn’t have to spend time managing hardware and maintenance. It’s also ultimately what enables us to deliver continuous innovation with three releases a year.

Now, instead of worrying about upgrades and maintenance, your focus can be on building applications that help your business and organization go faster. One of the coolest things about developing apps with Force.com is that you don’t have to be a coder. Everything developers and business users need to build, update, and customize apps is available in our point-and-click user interface or in our Web browser-based dev environment.

The Secret Sauce

The key to all of the above is our metadata-driven software architecture. Force.com uses a runtime engine that forms app data from metadata, basically data that is about the data. There is a clear separation between tenant data, the platform itself, and the metadata specific to each app, so when we deliver our three automatic upgrades a year, nothing breaks on your end, including customizations.

This also holds true if another tenant customizes an object or app UI. Even adding tens of thousands of new tenants to Force.com will not slow runtime. What does this mean for your business? It means it's easy to customize and easy to make changes. Apps stay current with all the business processes. No matter how big you grow or how many customers you add, you can trust Force.com to keep your IT infrastructure future-ready.