Raise your hand if you're an IT leader. Now, raise your hand if you're an IT leader with enough developers in your organization to address your backlog of app development projects. Nobody?

As businesses adjust to the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — including the increased need for application development — the shortage of qualified developers continues to be an acute challenge. That's why many companies are now turning to the Salesforce Lightning Platform's no-code and low-code tools to empower everyone — from Admins to business users to Developers — to build apps that transform their businesses.

A new IDC White Paper sponsored by Salesforce , “Business Value of Building Apps on the Salesforce Lightning Platform,” found that companies using the Lightning Platform to build apps achieve 545% ROI over five years, generate $3.7 million in higher revenue, and see 57%* faster IT development lifecycles. This is all thanks to the platform's low-code and no-code capabilities, allowing both business users and citizen developers alike to build innovative apps.

How are Lightning Platform Customers Achieving These Incredible Results?

The study surveyed seven Lightning Platform customers across a variety of industries. All currently use the Lightning Platform for traditional IT-driven app development, while about half use it to enable business users to build apps as well. The study highlighted a number of benefits that come from using the Lightning Platform, including:

• Increased Business User Productivity: The Lightning Platform is the fastest, easiest way to give business users the apps they need to do their jobs better. Based on the report, the overall value of increased user productivity and revenue can reach up to $8.82 million per year (per organization).
• Higher IT Staff Productivity: The Lightning Platform allows IT teams to build and deliver new apps and features faster than ever before, contributing to a 29% increase in app developer productivity.
• Faster Development Lifecycles: Enabling business users to build on the Lightning Platform democratizes app development, which accounts for a 57%* faster development cycle overall.

Empowering Everyone to Build Apps

Building apps is everyone's business with the Lightning Platform. In fact, enabling and empowering everyone to build apps can generate significant business value. While the platform's pro-code tools allow developers to innovate faster and build apps in any coding language via a modern development UI, the Lightning Platform's no-code and low-code app development tools make it accessible for business users to participate in app development in partnership with IT.

As one customer shared, “The democratization of development is the most significant benefit of the Lightning Platform. It has given us the ability to solve business problems that may not have justified using IT development time.”

Over 52% of IT leaders say that skill gaps are a major challenge in their organizations, making it more important than ever for technology to help companies overcome this skills gap (instead of perpetuating it). Enabling business users to develop apps helps our customers drive increased business value by arming non-IT developers with no-code tools that speed up development in a typically IT-sanctioned environment.

To learn more about how businesses are benefiting from building their apps on the Lightning Platform, download a free copy of the IDC study today to see how Salesforce customers are driving greater productivity, revenue, and overall business value by building apps on the Lightning Platform.

*Note: This data point was updated on Sept. 21, 2018 to reflect a recalculation.