IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research  utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5- year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the icons.

What is PaaS and Developer Services?

IDC considers a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) portfolio to consist of tools to automate the application development and deployment life cycle supported by a variety of developer services while abstracting the supporting infrastructure. According to the IDC MarketScape, “using a PaaS solution to gain speed and take advantage of integration points should be considered as a part of any organization's DX transformation. Organizations simply can't build applications with the same speed and quality without leveraging a PaaS solution.” Developer Services include data services, analytics, integration, security, and other features such as an application and service marketplace and geographic coverage.

4 Key Takeaways on Why Salesforce is a Leader

The IDC MarketScape noted a few key strengths in their key observations resulting in Salesforce's position in the report. Here’s a summary of what we hear from our customers on why Salesforce is their platform of choice:

1) Breadth of Platform Services:

The Salesforce Platform has pulled together a broad set of differentiated platform services, highlighted by the IDC MarketScape, to meet customer needs, including:

• Lightning Platform - low code development empowering business analysts to build apps,
• Heroku - a development-centric platform supporting open languages and technologies like Docker,
• Salesforce Connect - a rich set of data, event-driven, and API-first integration services,
• Salesforce Einstein - a layer of artificial intelligence (AI) built into the Salesforce Platform that delivers predictions and recommendations based on a customer's unique business processes and customer data,
• Lightning Flow - a rich set of visual process automation tools to support complex business processes,
• Salesforce DX - a set of open, standards-based developer tools that support continuous integration and continuous delivery,
• Salesforce Mobile - a robust set of mobile app dev capabilities including the Salesforce mobile app for iOS and Android, the Mobile SDK, and custom mobile backend services hosted on Heroku,
• Salesforce Shield - an enhanced set of tightly integrated trust and compliance services, including platform encryption and event monitoring, to protect customer data and comply with industry regulations, and
• Salesforce IoT - an integrated part of the Salesforce Platform that empowers anyone to harness IoT data to build, iterate and deploy proactive sales, service or marketing business processes.

2) Strength of Marketplace:

The IDC MarketScape recognized AppExchange as a strong marketplace with a wide partner ecosystem. AppExchange recently celebrated its 11th anniversary with over 5 million downloads, move than 3,000 applications, and more than 160 Lightning Components. Salesforce recently launched the new AppExchange with personalized discovery, integrated training with Trailhead, new Lightning Data and Bolt solutions, and a new set of curated industry collections.

3) Strong Developer Community and Outreach:

One of the key strengths highlighted by the IDC MarketScape is Salesforce's strong developer outreach. A highlight of this developer outreach is Trailhead, Salesforce's gamified, online learning platform, which was established with a mission to empower anyone to skill-up for a job in the thriving Salesforce economy. There are over 4 million registered developers on the Salesforce Platform, participating in more than 700 user groups around the globe. Since Trailhead was launched, Trailblazers (Salesforce's term for customers innovating on the Salesforce Platform) have earned more than 4 million badges and completed more than 15 million challenges.

4) Platform Ease of Use and Excellent Customer Support

The IDC MarketScape noted that partners and customers reported excellent support of a platform that was easy to deploy. Nothing is more important at Salesforce than customer success, and the Cloud Services Group is a special team dedicated to making sure customers succeed. At the core of the Salesforce Platform's ease of use is our focus on low code development and empowering anyone to build apps. This low code approach extends from the Lightning Platform for drag and drop application development to new low code tools to incorporate AI (Einstein), IoT, and even integration (Connect).

Learn more about why customers love the Salesforce Platform and why the IDC MarketScape named us a leader in PaaS. To read an excerpt of the IDC MarketScape, click here.

*DOC # US43209917, NOVEMBER 2017.