All about Salesforce Platform Edition
By: Sumit Mattey
Tags: Architecture, Business, Platform, Revenue, Salesforce

The Lightning Platform is a powerful cloud development solution that gives you the speed and ease of point-and-click app building with the flexibility of programmatic development and built in enterprise services. Build apps that are mobile, intelligent, and connected, right out of the box. And since the Lightning Platform is built API-first, it’s easy to unlock data from your back-office systems and give your team all the information they need in one place. Take advantage of the Lightning Platform’s leading multi tenant`, metadata-based cloud infrastructure to give your apps the same scalability and security that is trusted by more than 100,000 customers to run their business.

Salesforce recognizes the need for enterprises to focus on technology and the importance of applications to drive digital transformation. Salesforce built the platform to deliver these business needs, and the platform services and components are shown in Figure 1. These cater to the needs of different types of application builders ranging from citizen to professional developers.

Salesforce offers a scalable, trusted platform that serves over 150,000 customers and processes over 4BN transactions per business day. The platform serves customers across all time zones with high performance resiliency and provides cutting-edge Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) capabilities to build hybrid apps with fine-grained network control. Specialized runtimes serve particular styles of computing: Heroku for scalable (or “elastic”) tasks; Force.com for business-data focused tasks; and Thunder for processing event-driven streams of data. Complete abstraction and automation of infrastructure lets developers focus on building apps instead of remaining mired in otherwise manual tasks like database management, workload configuration, security patches, and operating system upgrade

The Salesforce Platform empowers everyone to go digital fast and scale with confidence.

Having a business is more than just coordinating all the operations that are taking place. There is a constant need to hustle along and have significant expertise in all the departments that you have so that you can manage your work well. With the advent of technology, things have become easier for businesses. You can use the Internet and SaaS-based platforms to ease your work. But all these advantages are present with your competitors too. To have an upper hand, you need to catch up with the latest trends in your market and align them with adequate technology. It may sounds a little complex but actually it is not at all complex.

Salesforce Lightning Platform Overview Demo

What building on the Lightning Platform means for Developers —

Future-ready infrastructure, with automatic platform upgrades 3x/year that don’t break your apps. API-first architecture to make it easy to connect apps to your business data. Component-based Salesforce Lightning UI framework, allowing you to build faster than ever. Instant deployment, real-time distribution, complete visibility and control.

What building on the Lightning Platform means for Business Users —

Connect every employee on a common platform that’s mobile and social right out of the box. Automate business processes and create apps with point and click, using Salesforce Lightning tools. Bring together information from multiple systems to give your team everything they need in one place. Easily manage users with admin tools, and control access with just a few clicks.

ROI Summary of Salesforce Platform Edition

- 57% faster IT app dev life cycle.

- 5.8x more business user-developed features.

- 545% 5-year ROI; you saw it right it is 545% only.

Salesforce Platform Components —

Industries who’re prominently using Salesforce Platform Edition —

E — Commerce (food) High-Tech Manufacturing Financial services IT service provider Healthcare Media/entertainment Online/Cloud-based technology service providers like — legal, IP, sales, social media, health related, and financial services)

Time to Go — Live —

As per our experience it depends on the application, but it takes about three to four months on average to develop an application with Salesforce; if we were doing that kind of product in-house, it would be six to seven months … If it’s a brand-new application, it would take less than a week to actually deploy on Salesforce; it might take two to three weeks with another approach for the first install. Speed of iteration is a huge benefit with Salesforce platform edition, or agile development, because we were able to deliver faster and deliver new applications. You can do this with other providers, but Heroku simplifies it greatly. It makes it really easy to update any application & simplifies the workflow for your developers to verify changes and stage them on a server.”

Productivity Benefits —

Salesforce also creates value by making core IT teams — most prominently application developers and IT infrastructure teams — more productive. Moving application development efforts to the cloud with the Salesforce platform and its capabilities saves time spent by both groups provisioning and supporting on-premise infrastructure, while the ability to develop and deliver more applications and features in less time means that application developers bring more value to their organizations.