Salesforce.com’s biggest announcement of Dreamforce ’13 is Salesforce1, but is it a branding exercise or a game changer?
Salesforce1 is the massive story of Dreamforce 2013, but just how real is it and what’s going to it do for Salesforce.com customers?
Unlike Dreamforce announcements of years past, Salesforce1 is shipping upon announcement, available within the type of dowloadable mobile apps. But there’s more work to be done if it’ll live as much as its billing as a “next-generation platform” which will connect partners, employees, customers, and customers’ customers through any device with “state-of-the-art, consumer-grade functionality.”
It’s tough to boil the facts out of some whirlwind, buzzword-packed keynote presentations. But Q&A sessions with Salesforce executives and interviews with customers and partners helped us fill in the various fuzzier aspects of the platform. So here is a closer study what it brings and what it promises.
As we’ve reported, Salesforce1 is a unifying, mobile-friendly, API-rich wrapper around everything Salesforce.com offers. The corporate is mobilizing everything, pointing to a Gartner forecast that 90% of enterprise applications would be mobile-accessible in addition to desktop-accessible by 2017. Today that figure stands at toward 20%, so Salesforce1 is, at first, an effort to deliver better out-of-the-box smartphone and tablet apps while also making it easier to develop custom mobile apps.
[ Want more at the importance of application programming interfaces? Read APIs: Why You wish to have a method Now. ]
Benioff confessed that the company’s first attempt at “next-gen” mobility, Salesforce Touch, was a “spectacular failure.” But what Salesforce learned from that effort, he said, was that it needed many more application programming interfaces (APIs) to show the corporate’s many services and capabilities. Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris said the company was resolute to give those APIs without forcing customers to recreate or change such things as custom objects, custom fields, or VisualForce custom interfaces created years ago but still in use.
Salesforce services, customizations, reports, dashboards and other parts of the ecosystem that weren’t accessible before on mobile devices at the moment are “just there” in a brand new Salesforce1 Mobile App, consistent with Benioff. This broadly-capable new app replaces the Chatter Mobile app (and Benioff says the corporate was secretly beta testing Salesforce1 under the “Chatter” badge for weeks). Salesforce also introduced at Dreamforce new Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud mobile apps said to be built on Salesforce1’s new APIs and mobile capabilities.
Salesforce1 serves five constituents: developers get “10 times more” APIs; partners get new tools to make their apps mobile; end-users get the all-new mobile apps; administrators get a brand new “Salesforce1 A” mobile admin app for provisioning (and freezing) end users; and customers get what Salesforce describes as a more cohesive and connected experience around the Salesforce ecosystem — including acquired bits like Heroku, ExactTarget, Buddy Media, and Radian6.
Reasons to love Salesforce1
It’s refreshing that Salesforce1 is shipping today inside the type of the recent mobile app and admin apps available within the Apple and Android app stores. All those new APIs also are accessible to developers today, providing granular access to Salesforce services. In recent times there was a niche of a year or more between Dreamforce announcements and product availability.
State-of-the art, consumer-grade smartphone and tablet capabilities are rare within the enterprise applications arena, so Salesforce has to be lauded for “hitting the reset button,” as Benioff put it, after it was clear Salesforce Touch was a failure. It took greater than a year to rewrite the Salesforce API layer, and continuous API improvement can be an ongoing task.
The Salesforce1 platform and all those APIs aren’t only for mobile apps. They’ll also provide links for desktop, laptops, and connected devices.GE jet engines, GE locomotives, or even Philips Sonicare toothbrushes were mentioned by Benioff as “Internet of consumers” opportunities.
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