So let’s dissect the press release (it can be found here) in our customary style:
SAN FRANCISCO—September 10, 2015—Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the Customer Success Platform and world’s #1 CRM company, today announced Salesforce App Cloud, the next evolution of the Salesforce1 Platform. App Cloud integrates the platform services Salesforce is known for—including Force, Heroku Enterprise and Lightning—with new shared identity, data and network services to empower CIOs to deliver connected apps for any business need. In addition, App Cloud’s platform services include Trailhead, a new interactive learning environment for all Salesforce app creators, and the AppExchange, the largest enterprise app marketplace in the world. Delivering all of these services on Salesforce’s trusted cloud infrastructure, App Cloud empowers CIOs with everything they need to build apps fast in any language they want, for any device, and manage them in a single enterprise cloud environment.MyPOV – Good to see Salesforce bringing together the branding for all its development platforms, which ends the source of substantial confusion in the ecosystem and as well as on the messaging side. And good to see it is not only messaging but also substantial work and heavy lifting that has taken place to make this happen – on both an identity, data and networking level. And any evangelist will be happy to the see knowledge distribution platform – a key tool for developer success – mentioned in the first paragraph (Trailhead).
In this burgeoning app economy, CIOs face enormous demand from their businesses to deliver apps that connect with customers, employees and even products, across every device. The lines between apps for consumer engagement, connected devices, and enterprise management are blurring. Now an app can connect drivers, cars and passengers, all in a single connected experience. Yet, CIOs are contending with siloed development platforms that are not able to produce apps that span different technical architectures and address multiple use cases. And, companies have increasing requirements around compliance and governance for their entire portfolio of apps.MyPOV – Salesforce is right that for a long time we have seen dedicated development tools and platforms for specific product problems. Mobile vs social vs real time vs parallel etc. The vendor is not totally innocent here, starting with the former Salesforce1 for mobile, which lead to a number of misunderstandings. [Update September 11 - Salesforce AR correctly points out that Salesforce1 for mobile is still around.] And Salesforce is right that enterprises want (and need) holistic development tools, as the new applications they build need to work for their enterprise in a holistic way and fashion. […]
Salesforce App Cloud—the Unified Platform for Delivering Connected Apps FastMyPOV – Good to see Salesforce moving Heroku closer to the overall platform. As much as Heroku was and is its standalone platform, the value for Salesforce customer was and is to connect Heroku projects with their existing Force.com based products and projects. Making it easier for customers is always a good move and will be highly welcome. Security innovations like Private Spaces is something enterprise want and have been waiting for since a long time. With the support of Salesforce Identity single sign-on and role based access control is provided for Heroku, equally important for customers.
Salesforce pioneered the enterprise Platform as a Service market when it launched the Force platform in 2008. And today, Salesforce is the leading enterprise PaaS. The new App Cloud extends that leadership. CIOs are now empowered to build, scale and deploy mobile, web and wearable apps in a unified environment with new platform services including:
● Heroku Enterprise—Private Spaces, Regions and Identity: Heroku Enterprise offers everything that developers love, with new capabilities that give CIOs the control they need. Now, Heroku Enterprise enables developers to create connected apps using network, data and identity services shared across the App Cloud. With Private Spaces, businesses can run apps in a dedicated Heroku private space with direct access to Salesforce's trusted infrastructure and to customers’ onpremise data from legacy systems. With Regions, companies can choose to run their apps in metro areas throughout the worldincluding Dublin, Frankfurt, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Northern Virginia and Oregonbased on accessibility, compliance or other requirements. In addition, with Identity, Heroku Enterprise is connected to Force with bidirectional data sync, single signon and robust rolebased access controls.
What Salesforce has effectively done, is rolling out Heroku more on the AWS infrastructure (the list of locations above is pretty much AWS data center locations) and connect those securely between the AWS and Salesforce data centers, effectively creating a cross cloud platform PaaS, most likely an industry first.
● Salesforce Lightning—The Future of Modern Apps: Salesforce Lightning is a new metadatadriven platform service that is highly customizable, enabling anyone to build modern, connected app experiences that empower people to work faster, smarter and the way they want. Now anyone can create engaging user experiences by simply dragging and dropping components—prebuilt, reusable building blocks, such as maps, calendars, buttons, and number entry forms. And, with Salesforce Lightning Design System, every developer has a howto guide and code for building beautiful apps.MyPOV – When building next gen Applications developers and increasingly business users look for easy and fast ways to build applications. Lightning, announced a year ago at Dreamforce 2014 is Salesforce’s tool for this and it is good to see it as part of the fold of the announcement.
● Trailhead—Interactive Learning for All Salesforce App Creators: App Cloud includes Trailhead, a new interactive learning environment. Incorporating gamification, Trailhead guides all Salesforce app creators—from developers and business admins to endusers, marketers and data analysts—through the basic building blocks of App Cloud’s services. Trailhead allows them to test their knowledge while earning points and badges to celebrate their achievements. Content in Trailhead is organized in trails to give users everything they need to know about developing apps with the App Cloud, and is available free of charge. To date, more than 35,000 app creators have participated in Trailhead training, and have earned more than 120,000 badges during its beta release.MyPOV – Important to see the knowledge distribution tool as part of a platform announcement, as users should get productive fast. Salesforce has done a good job with Trailhead, gamification being a highlight that works across developer generations. More importantly is the content and it is key for Salesforce to provide it timely and in high quality as it has done in the past – also going forward (see below).
With services for rapid app development, modern user experiences, integration, mobile app dev, identity management, compliance, governance and more, App Cloud is the most comprehensive and agile platform available to CIOs to deliver their app portfolio. App Cloud also includes an ecosystem of 2.3 million developers, who have built 5.5 million apps, and the AppExchange, the world’s largest enterprise app marketplace, which features more than 2,700 ISV apps and 40 Lightning Components. All of this runs on the industry’s most trusted enterprise infrastructure that delivers approximately 3.7 billion transactions every business day.MyPOV – Interesting to see Salesforce sharing adoption numbers – and 2.3M developers, 5.5M apps, and 2.7k ISVs are very impressive numbers and so is the 3.7B daily transactions. Over the last 15 years Salesforce has built up a veritable ecosystem of developers and ISVs, but the market remains competitive, more below.
Comments on the news:
● “CIOs need a way to develop apps for the connected world,” said Tod Nielsen, executive vice president of App Cloud, Salesforce. “App Cloud brings together all of Salesforce’s leading platform services, empowering IT leaders with an integrated, trusted platform to quickly build connected apps for every business need.”
● “We’ve built more than 200 apps on Salesforce, and most of them were built by ‘citizen developers,’” said Herry Stallings, AVP of Applications Development, USAA. “Salesforce gives us all the cloud services we need to achieve incredible speed and scale in our app development, allowing us to keep innovating and grow our business.” […]
MyPOV – Always good to see customer quotes using the products, looks like USAA has built a lot on the Salesforce platforms. And it is good to see Salesforce acknowledge the need to connect the ‘two worlds’ of Force.com based products and solutions with applications built on Heroku.
Pricing and AvailabilityMyPOV – Kudos to Salesforce for transparency on availability and pricing of product, a good practice the vendors has been showing since a while and a good example for the industry. Customers and ecosystems appreciate the clarity.
● Heroku Private Spaces, Regions, and Identity are scheduled to be available in early 2016. Pricing for the new services will be announced at the time of general availability.
● Lightning Experience will be available in all Salesforce languages, except Arabic and Hebrew.
● Lightning App Builder and Components for Lightning Experience on the desktop are expected to be in pilot in October 2015 and expected to be generally available in Q1 2016. Access to both is included in all CRM and Force admin licenses.
● Salesforce Lighting App Builder and Components for mobile apps are generally available with the current release of Salesforce and are included in all CRM and Force admin licenses
● Salesforce Lightning Design System is currently available for free and can be accessed at http://salesforce.com/designsystem
● Trailhead is expected to be generally available in October 2015
● All other App Cloud services are available today and offer per user and consumptionbased pricing
Overall MyPOV
It is good to see Salesforce creating value for customers, making it easier for customers (both end users and ISVs) to build applications that span the two prominent Salesforce platforms, the Force.com based world and the Heroku world. Single Sign-On, Identity, network security are all key capabilities CxOs will value when deciding on platforms to build next generation applications. Adding declarative capabilities with Lightning is key step for more productivity to build applications more efficiently. And coming out with Trailhead in a timely fashion is key for adoption.But the most remarkable part of the Salesfroce App Cloud announcement is that Salesforce is effectively announcing a cross cloud platform PaaS. The vendor is usually coy at admitting that Heroku runs on top of Amazon AWS, and the rest of Salesforce runs in Salesforce data centers. Now customers and partners can more easily build applications across both platforms, effectively creating the first multi-cloud PaaS. While other PaaS products allow deployment of finished applications across other clouds, an important capability, the Salesforce App Cloud brings two platforms together. And it gives customers – given that they build on the Heroku side of the offering, a wide variety of physical deployment options that matter today both from a data sovereignty and performance perspective. And adding the private spaces capability to Heroku will help dissolve some cloud fears and concerns at worried customers, a good move.
On the concern side this is Salesforce bundling together many of its announcements and deliveries of the past, integrating them and bringing them together is good news, but you can wonder what took Salesforce so long? Why take the (confusing) detour via Salesforce1 – App Cloud could have been announced in 2014, maybe even 2012. And while I am certain that the engineers work hard at Salesforce, I can’t follow the product strategy and marketing messaging. Remember, Heroku was once mentioned as the replacement for Force.com based applications at a Dreamforce (2010?)? The open source future of Salesforce. Water under the bridge, but it really comes back to understand the balance between responsibility towards the installed base on the one side and innovation on the other side. Not being able to deploy Salesforce App Cloud solution beyond AWS is a downside compared with e.g. popular enterprise like Pivotal CloudFoundry or IBM Bluemix, but what hasn’t happened can still be. Nothing hinders Salesforce to bring Heroku to e.g. Azure, GCP, IBM SoftLayer etc.
For now a good step in the right direction, a multi-cloud PaaS innovation, making it easier for customers and partners to build next generation applications an now unified platform – the Salesforce App Cloud – both from a messaging and architecture perspective. We will check it out more at Dreamforce next week, you can bet on that, stay tuned.