This month, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of Salesforce mobile. Over one million users are running their business from their phone using the Salesforce1 Mobile App. Salesforce1 is our flagship application, but Salesforce mobile is so much more. We have seven apps in our app portfolio, including customer service, sales productivity, analytics, and administration. And if you can’t find what you are looking for there, build any mobile app with the App Cloud. Salesforce is now an industry leader in mobility thanks to our mobile first culture and it all began a decade ago in Santa Monica, California.

First Steps In Enterprise Mobility

Salesforce’s mobile journey started in 2006 with the acquisition of a small startup called Sendia. It was an incredible time. BlackBerry and Treo ruled the smartphone market. Email was the only business app on your phone. We saw an opportunity to bring customer relationship management (CRM) to mobile devices. That’s right, they weren’t even called smart phones yet. Mobile offered a way to focus on the user and drive productivity from anywhere, rather than just do traditional record management. The original Salesforce mobile app, called AppExchange Mobile, was built using the Salesforce API. You could view accounts, contacts, and opportunities from anywhere and we even built an early version of a mapping app. I even did product demonstrations on a giant Blackberry.

Embracing the Mobile Revolution

The mobile app revolution really took off in 2007 with the launch of iPhone. Salesforce was invited to speak at the Apple App Store launch event in 2008. The premise was simple, help salespeople sell from anywhere. It was a great honor to be the first enterprise partner on the AppStore. We knew that the iPhone would change the world and we moved fast to create the very best experience for our users. This would not be the last time we aligned with Apple’s vision.

In 2010, Salesforce launched Chatter, the world’s first enterprise collaboration tool. Chatter was a natural fit for mobile devices. People want to stay connected when they are out of the office and everyone loves collaborating and communicating with colleagues. Now, users could post a file, ask a question, then receive a notification with the answer. We learned customer use cases we never imagined. One of my favorites is a beverage distributor who uses Chatter to take pictures of store displays and then shares them with the account team to make sure their brand is properly represented.

Run Your Business On Your Phone With Salesforce1

Innovation never slows down at Salesforce. We knew we had to deliver more flexibility and scale to our ever growing customer base. Salesforce1 was born at Dreamforce ‘13. If you are familiar with Salesforce, you know our secret sauce is really having a single metadata platform upon which we build all of our products. Salesforce1 is a seamless extension of the platform; it is all of Salesforce on a device. The app is fast, smart, and flexible to meet any business need.

Salesforce1 has allowed us to truly expand to any device, even devices we hadn’t planned on. In 2015, Salesforce was again invited to an Apple launch for the new Apple Watch. CRM on a watch; that is a use case I did not see coming. Salesforce1 for Apple Watch has unlocked some amazing use cases: sales managers are seeing deal update on the fly, finance is processing approvals from anywhere. The Watch fits perfectly into the Salesforce mobile portfolio and represents the future of devices.

From One App to the Mobile App Portfolio

Salesforce1 was a turning point towards true enterprise mobility. To build the app, we created the Salesforce Lighting Design System, a set of common UI patterns providing a consistent user experience. The same design guidelines will now apply to apps from Salesforce and our AppExchange community, offering a highly integrated experience across multiple apps for helping everyone connect to their customers in a whole new way. Looking back, we realize that the first steps taken by Sendia laid the foundation for the future.

The Salesforce1 Mobile App and the Mobile Portfolio are helping over one million customers succeed every month. If you have not experienced Salesforce1, go download it now from the App Store. Stay tuned for our Summer ‘16 release, we have a few special things planned to celebrate 10 years!

Ciao,

Paolo Bergamo

SVP, Salesforce Mobile