Salesforce is no longer just the CRM tool, that it was introduced as, just about a decade or so back. Today Salesforce is more of a cloud computing and business management company, which includes most, if not all business functions of an enterprise, to be migrated into the Salesforce platform and also a cloud computing and mobile platform, where businesses can move their entire operation into the Salesforce PaaS platform called Forcedotcom . This migration would not only reduce the operational expenditure, but also provide varied means through which companies can reduce their expenditure on infrastructure development and concentrate on their resource allocation towards customised application development, catering to their specific business needs, while populating those apps on the Salesforce Cloud platform. This would mean that the robust security and flexibility of Salesforce cloud solutions can be leveraged to produce industry / business specific apps, which would bring to the table, exactly what the customer ordered, without having to infuse huge amount of inherent funding. So, one can have the cake and eat it too.

Salesforce now does not restrict itself in its traditional domains like Sales, service, data etc., but indulges in high level customisation. The customisation I mention here relates to customer level or enterprise driven coding, which can be easily be made effective by using “Apex”, which is a Salesforce specific coding language like Java. As platform agnostic as Java, only that it serves a different purpose. All these apps which are created by the Salesforce cloud users are readily integrated into the Salesforce platform. Now that platform is available, cloud computing is available and a coding language is available, it was only natural that Salesforce developed a visual experience that would act as a view control for building the pages which could be viewed on the Salesforce platform. That has not surprisingly been called as the visualforce.

If a company has moved into the cloud space, either the enterprise is making a move to be a sustainable business for the future, or it is looking to be a relevant entity in the current times, by cutting down operational expenditure. Under both these scenarios, it is a no-brainer that most customers today access the internet and by extension the cloud computing solutions and especially the Salesforce customers, through the ubiquitous smart phone and other mobile devices. Salesforce was not going to be far behind in letting its platform users be devoid of a worthwhile mobile platform. And so, the cloud computing prowess of Salesforce today is dovetailed to the salesforce1 platform, which is a custom mobile platform for Salesforce cloud computing users.

Cloud computing has been a revelation to most businesses and Salesforce, being an alive animal from its earliest days of inception would not have been left behind. It was only to be expected that this level of cloud computing compatibility would be seen in salesforce and the users of the cloud applications, not only depend on the pure Salesforce cloud applications, but also depend on the umpteen third party cloud solution providers to step up and make the platform more and more robust and user friendly.