Jul 18, 2016 By Jennifer Hersom

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About App Building But Were Afraid to Ask

in IT, Apps, App Cloud

Today’s customers, both internal and external, have unprecedented power and are looking for a complete and effortless experience. In the Age of the Customer, apps — whether used to connect departments, gather data, or interact with customers — are essential to running a business because they deliver the connected experience that your customers demand. According to our State of IT report, 79 percent of IT leaders are developing apps for customers, partners, and employees.

In one industry after another, established giants have watched their dominant position crumble as startups, fueled by apps, have disrupted long-established ways of doing business. Uber is often cited as the poster child for this new way of thinking — a startup with virtually no assets or market presence that overturned an entire industry overnight. But Uber was just the beginning. The rate of change — and the heat of competition — is only increasing.

Exponential growth in the demand for apps is putting tremendous pressure on IT departments to deliver, and in many cases, that means a growing backlog of apps. The demand for enterprise mobile apps will soon be 5 times the current capacity of IT to deliver, according to a Gartner report. To get ahead of the curve, every organization has to find a way to deliver better, more connected apps — faster.

The solution is Salesforce App Cloud, a platform flexible enough to let almost anyone build low-code apps fast so businesses can democratize the app-building process beyond IT — yet sophisticated enough to let developers build with the modern languages, tools, and processes they love. Build apps for customers, employees, and partners, and do it faster without having to worry about infrastructure or maintenance. It’s one-stop-shopping for app development.

The Big Book

To cover all of the needs of modern app development, App Cloud has developed many platforms. Now, they’re all in one place. The new ebook, “Building Modern Apps for the Age of the Customer,” is the source of truth for all things App Cloud. An essential resource for IT leaders beginning to transform their businesses, the book covers the pillars of building productivity apps, creating engaging experiences, and getting complete customer data.

With App Cloud, you can build different types of apps: model-driven, elastic, or streaming. Developers and business analysts can build model-driven apps using App Cloud’s low-code and no-code tools. Developers can build elastic apps when they need expandable, scalable computing power. Both developers and business analysts can build streaming apps to filter, process, and take action on enormous amounts of data from the Internet of Things. With App Cloud, regardless of what type of app you build, all of your data is connected so that you can provide the single experience that today’s customers demand.

What Else Is New?

Read on for insight on:

The Lightning Platform: A way to build and deploy apps more rapidly

The Mobile App Development Platform: A mobile-first mindset finds customers where they live and work

Heroku Enterprise: A platform that gives developers the flexibility and control to rapidly create, deploy, monitor, and scale apps using preferred languages and tools, while maintaining the enterprise trust and control you need