Let’s face it … time is money. Businesses today are constantly under pressure to reduce their costs, improve agility, and deliver better results. Couple that with rapidly evolving technology and a growing shortage of developers, and there’s no question that the the role of IT and CIOs is changing to drive more innovation — faster and at a lower cost.

Recently, consulting firm IDC surveyed 12 Salesforce App Cloud customers in various industries: consumer goods, manufacturing, financial services, IT service, healthcare, entertainment, and others. IDC evaluated the business impact of building apps on the App Cloud platform, and concluded that App Cloud customers are achieving 478% 5-year ROI, releasing new apps in 59% less time, and increasing revenues an average of $55K per 100 users, letting them break even in just seven months.

How Are Customers Achieving These Results with App Cloud?

The study finds that the investment customers make in App Cloud pays off in many ways and customers are realizing business value by:

• Generating more revenue: App Cloud customers are delivering high-performing apps and new features to their users and customers in less time. As a result, they are winning more business and making their employees more productive.

• Driving higher IT staff productivity: Salesforce customers’ app-development teams require much less time per new app and feature. Also moving to a PaaS solution with App Cloud means less IT staff time is needed to manage infrastructure-supporting apps, an average of about six weeks with Salesforce. According to one customer, “Before, it would take 3-4 months. We cut that time out, and we're saving a bunch of money at least $100K/year."

• Increasing productivity of app dev teams: Apps developed on the Salesforce platform have fewer unexpected outages, which improves productivity.

• IT infrastructure cost reductions: With a cloud-based platform, App Cloud customers require fewer test and production servers, reducing the costs of developing and delivering apps.

Per the study, available now, these companies have used App Cloud to make “their application development efforts more agile and scalable to match demand from their business operations, which leads to better business outcomes and operational efficiencies.”

A Spectrum of Benefits

As one Salesforce customer said, “It was the speed to deliver, lack of infrastructure, and the flexibility to develop in an interactive and agile manner that led us to App Cloud.” Because Salesforce has automated and abstracted the infrastructure, businesses suddenly have the ability (and time) to develop apps faster. And with no-code app development tools like Lightning App Builder, they aren’t limited by their supply of developers. App Cloud offers a span of developer tools that support business-analyst (or “citizen”) developers for drag-and-drop development and configuration, and professional developers for Mobile Apps via Salesforce1 SDK or build compute-intensive, “elastic” apps. Before App Cloud, the study says, it would take more than 15 weeks to develop an app or major feature. App Cloud cuts that time in half.  

The IDC study illustrates how change now affects everyone, and that Salesforce App Cloud is versatile enough to help companies evolve. As one customer said, “Salesforce App Cloud created less reliance on IT to bring applications to market — we didn’t have to rely on IT to set up servers, and the cloud makes things faster.”

Read more here in the full study.