Around 4 months ago, it was mid November, Salesforce.com released it's new Salesforce1 product during their annual Dreamforce1 conference. It caused quite a stir and more questions in regards of what Salesforce1 really is...
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If you are interested in the research report - you can find it here on the Constellation website.
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More on Salesforce.com:
You can read my impressions here and even better see Alan Lepofsky's takeaways's of Day 1 here:
So we gave Salesforce1 a run for it on two levels
- The analyst view - Basically Alan Lepofsky, Bruce Daley and me took a look at what the implication of Salesforce1 is from our three coverage perspectives - Social / Collaboration, CRM and PaaS / IaaS & HCM.
- The user view - Then we described what Salesforce1 means (in alphabetical order) for the Chief Information Officer, Chief People Officer, Chief Sales Officer, CxO that serves as Social Champion, and Chief Technology Officer.
Salesforce.com needs to move
But first we laid out why Salesforce.com needs to move on the platform side - as its existing platform is coming of age. With an ambitious agenda to power the Internet of Things from the customer perspective, Salesforce.com needs to move beyond Apex etc. and create / acquire a highly scalable middleware platform, BigData and Analytics capabilities.
So what is Salesforce1
We then took a look at what Salesforce1 means for different technology elements:
1. Mobile Unification – Previously, customers would run a traditional Salesforce app and Chatter as separate applications on their mobile devices. If you add a Heroku app, that’s three applications to use, login to, maintain and secure. With Salesforce1, it’s one application now.
2. Integration – On the mobile side, Salesforce.com showed integration from the same application with partners such as Evernote. There is not a separate login and everything is in one user interface - a manifestation of what Constellation analyst Bruce Daley calls the integration layer.
3. Higher API granularity – Salesforce.com has left behind the era of one API fits all and has made all APIs more granular, so small that some colleagues even call them services.
4. Application composition – Given the higher granularity of APIs, creating applications with Salesforce1 becomes much more a composition experience for the developer than a coding experience.
5. A new mobile UI – With a new user experience for both iOS and Android devices, Salesforce1 achieves what Touch was supposed to address. Gone is HTML5 and back is native. But that is a technical side note.
6. Heroku1 – With Heroku1, Salesforce.com creates a formal integration option for Heroku apps to access Force.com, a significant step but also a sign that there is a platform duopoly in the future of Salesforce.com.
The CxO Perspectives
And lastly we took a look at the aforementioned CxO perspectives - some key takeaway excerpts are below:- CIO Perspective - One of the main benefits is simplified maintenance, it's great to see Salesforce.com having discovered the importance of system administrators again - and specifically builds it's product and tools with them in mind.
- CTO Perspective - For the CTO, Salesforce1 is a proof that the Internet of Things is coming - and coming faster than many CTOs may think. They should use Salesforce1 at a minimum as a data point that they need to develop their enterprise Internet of Things strategy - and more advanced - use Salesforce1 as an evaluation candidate for the customer centric view on the Internet of Things.
- CxO that takes Social Champion role and his / her Perspective - This executive should understand that social and collaborative features need to become part of their enterprises business strategy.
- Chief Sales Officer Perspective - The immediate impact here is a new and more user friendly mobile client for Salesforce.com users. Longer term Salesforce1 may serve as an Inclusion Layer that will enable more advanced mobile processes.
- Chief People Officer Perspective - It's time to re-imagine the way how HR Technology is delivered. Maybe HR Technology will not be a separate product you have to log in to to perform HCM tasks - but these tasks will be broken down and moved closer into the applications business users need to use already. So they should keep an eye on what Salesforce.com has done with the performance management work of work.com.
MyPOV
It was time for Salesforce.com to come up with a new platform vision - and it did with Salesforce1 - with great ambition and a promising design. It means that Salesforce.com also needs to address technologies that it has not touched before - most prominently BigData and Analytics. Now it needs to deliver towards that vision and show customer traction.
Whats your POV?
-----------------If you are interested in the research report - you can find it here on the Constellation website.
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More on Salesforce.com:
- Dreamforce 2013 Platform Takeaways - All about the mobile platform - or more? Read here.
- Platform ecosystems are hard - Salesforce grows it - FinancialForce shrinks it - read here.
- Our take on Salesforce.com Identity Connect - from three angles - Identity, CRM and PaaS - read here.
- Takeaways from the Salesforce and Workday Strategic Partnership - read here.
- Act II - The Cloud changes everything - Oracle and Salesforce.com - read here.
- How many Pivots make a Pirouette? Salesforce's last Pivot - read here.