OREANDA-NEWS. August 18, 2015. At Salesforce, we speak often about the innovation imperative facing every company. How important agile application development is to this. How speed is the key to successfully innovating with apps in the enterprise. How the Salesforce Platform delivers everything you need to build these game-changing apps, “lightning” fast.

That’s a big promise and one we don’t make lightly. And we have no problem backing it up. We’ve broken out four of the core pillars of the Salesforce Platform so it’s clear exactly how our technology makes rapid app dev a reality for you, your IT department, and your broader organization.

Cloud

The Salesforce Platform is a next generation Platform as a Service (PaaS) that frees up IT to focus on development by managing things such as upgrades, servers, and databases. Our unique metadata-driven software architecture was specifically pioneered to power multitenant application development. It’s also what runs the Salesforce products you know and love, such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

It means you get the benefits and core services of sharing the main framework, but there is a clear separation between tenant data and the platform. Even with three upgrades a year, nothing breaks. Not apps, not customizations. In addition to our model-driven cloud, Force.com, we also tie in an elastic public cloud with Heroku. This gives your developers all the controls they need, so they can build apps that scale with your company’s success.

Components

The reality is there aren’t enough developers to go around. This isn’t a problem that’s disappearing anytime soon. By 2020, it’s expected there will be 1 million more development jobs than people qualified to fill them. Yet companies still need to build enterprise apps. Salesforce understands this challenge. That’s why we are democratizing app dev by empowering those with and without a hardcore coding background.

Business users and developers alike can leverage drag-and-drop premade Salesforce Lightning Components that speed app building. This library of quick-start tools lives in the AppExchange marketplace, where it can be easily called upon for use with Lightning App Builder.

Connected

Much is being made of all the smartphones, wearables, and other connected devices in the marketplace. But the truly powerful part of each of these gadgets is the applications that run on them. Apps are what bring your company’s products and services closer to the end user. It’s that connection, and the data being generated as a result, that provides the real value. When managed well, this data is how you both anticipate and meet your customers’ needs.

Every app built on the Salesforce Platform can be made mobile, social, and connected via APIs, almost instantly. Once deployed, these apps can run on any device, in any language. Our integration tools, such as Lightning Connect, mean the moment data is changed on the back-end, it’s automatically updated in real time within your applications.

Customization

Every company can now be a software company. Why is this? Because no matter what your industry, custom applications give you the power to deliver rapid innovation that differentiates your brand. The speed at which these apps are delivered and improved upon can dramatically boost your organization’s competitiveness.

Employee apps, built with Force.com, help your staff do more, faster, by automating processes. These applications can be created specific to roles and departments, from HR, to sales, to marketing. Meanwhile, beautiful customer-facing apps, built with Heroku, have the power to transform relationships by driving engagement. Developers can code in any language and focus on building great apps, not managing things like servers, deployment, or scalability.