Brief: Salesforce Pivots To Modern Applications

A new platform choice for customer-facing apps and a business technology (BT) agenda has emerged: Salesforce. Two years of engineering is shifting Salesforce's cloud platforms to modern component frameworks suitable for a variety of customer-facing applications, while still supporting the internal applications that have been the company's bread and butter. The most visible result of this work is the company's new Lightning component model for apps and visual composition tools for internal apps. But the most important change is Salesforce's beefing up of its Heroku platform for developing customer-facing apps that leverage core Salesforce applications and services. The strategy is powerful, but there's more engineering to be done to deliver it. This brief analyzes the potential and the pitfalls of the new Salesforce platform.