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For too long, there’s been a chasm at the heart of business app development. It’s stopped many apps from realising their full business potential – and many others from being realised at all.

But now, it’s possible to close that chasm like never before, saving IT time, and empowering your most inspired business users along the way.

Here’s where too many app building efforts have been falling down, and why they don’t need to any more…

 

Why building apps has been so hard

Here’s the problem. The people in your organisation who know exactly what they need from a new app – Jenny in Service, or Raj in Marketing – rarely have the deep coding ability to build that app from scratch.

Your devs, meanwhile, certainly have the coding chops. But they can’t hope to understand the new app’s business potential like Jenny or Raj. (They’re also likely to be rushed of their feet.) Essentially:

  • Business users don’t have the coding skills
  • IT teams don’t have the business insight
  • No one has the time

The advent of the first cloud-based app-building platforms (PaaS) promised to at least ease the pressure on IT teams, minimising time spent building and managing app dev environments. And they did. But they also opened up a whole new world of issues.

PaaS designed exclusively for business users is making it easy for Jenny and Raj to build limited apps without banging on IT’s door. The result is:

  • Siloes of sub-optimal apps
  • Duplicated app-building effort
  • An increasingly costly and complex app environment
  • A lack of IT overview
  • Inconsistent app security

PaaS designed exclusively for coders, meanwhile, still leaves you with:

  • A hefty workload for your devs
  • The struggle to align their skills with Jen and Raj’s business vision

It’s clear that neither is a perfect solution. Ideally, you want an app-building platform that works for Jen, Raj and IT. You want a platform that enables a smart division of labour, so everyone is working on the tasks that they can do the best.

That’s why we opened up the Salesforce Platfrom to our customers. 

 

Why building apps just got a whole lot easier

Combining Force.com, Heroku, and Lightning in a single platform, we’ve created a best-in-class app development environment that supports everything from deep, hairy coding, to drag-and-drop creation.

  • Your developers – get to focus on building the apps and app components that only they can
  • Your business teams – take those components, components from AppExchange, and their own inspiration, and build the app they really need

Even better, IT maintains its overview of app creation efforts, and because app building is out in the open, that effort isn’t duplicated across business units.

 

Make your apps happen, today.

The future of app development is here – and it’s for everyone. Read How to Find the Right Platform for Building App e-book for a deeper dive into the limitations of traditional app building platforms, and discover how building on the Salesforce Platform can provide a better way.