[Salesforce.com] Gartner Magic Quadrant for High Productivity Application Platforms as a Service (April 2017)

What is hpaPaaS?

The world of Enterprise IT is rapidly embracing a more efficient, low code approach to application development. In fact, 82% of IT professionals say they are willing and ready to try low code in their organizations to achieve 1) better IT-business collaboration, 2) more time for IT to focus on complex tasks, and 3) higher level of innovation[1]. As a result, high productivity cloud platforms are becoming critical. With a high productivity aPaaS, IT can work much more closely with the business to rapidly deliver apps and digitize processes. Using model-driven development, business users and less technical ‘citizen developers’ can create the major part of the application, calling for IT’s help only for governance and custom code. The result is faster app dev, broader business empowerment, and accelerated innovation.

That’s why the Salesforce platform, with 18 years of innovation in its aPaaS capabilities, is a leader in the space. Thousands of our customers have unlocked the power of our platform beyond CRM as the fastest path from idea to impact. From healthcare companies building patient care apps to supply chain and contracts departments automating their processes on our aPaaS, customers have embraced Salesforce to enable IT to blaze a completely new trail in application development.

Gartner provides a comprehensive perspective on Salesforce’s leadership in this new valuable report. And here’s a summary of what we hear from our customers on why Salesforce is the platform of their choice:

1)    Unmatched investment in innovative hpaPaaS capabilities

AI, IoT, events-driven IT and the ability to deliver amazing user experiences with just clicks are all areas where Salesforce has introduced innovations. We recently announced predictive vision service (Einstein Vision), continuous DevOps (Salesforce DX), at-rest encryption key management, and enhanced API management to ensures customers are able to innovate at the pace of the digital disruptions. Additionally, the scale Salesforce provides to support these innovations is massive. We run 120 million tests per release to make sure all new functionality works while preserving backwards compatibility.

2)    Intelligence built right into the platform, enabling AI for everyone

Intelligence is becoming the next frontier for cloud platforms. It is enabling transformative capabilities in the cloud that weren’t available before. With Salesforce Einstein, the intelligence layer is built right into our hpaPaaS. Einstein learns from all the data stored and processed in the platform, and delivers predictions and recommendations to the apps built using our high productive low code capabilities. Einstein also lets citizen developers build intelligent task automation features such as contextual login and access to data, ultimately delivering seamless experience to both employees and customers. Einstein is open and taps well into the global AI ecosystem showcased in our recent partnership with IBM Watson.

3)    The power to build apps around your customer

If you look at all the disruptions in technology, businesses that succeed are the ones that own the customer experience by putting the customer at the heart of everything they do. Uber, the transportation network company, has no fleet, and Airbnb, the online marketplace and hospitality service, owns no real estate – all they own is the interface with the customer and their data. Salesforce provides the most seamless and complete access to your most important data – your customer data. The ability to build applications that extend this powerful customer intelligence – with simple point and click tools, makes Salesforce the most valuable hpaPaaS.

4)    A platform that gives both productivity and control to IT

High productivity platforms, first and foremost, empower the non-coders to build applications. But because technology changes so fast, there will always be a need for custom code-oriented development to deliver unique experiences. For example, according to Gartner, by 2020, 30% of web searches will be done without a screen[2]. Conversational interfaces, bots, and more are all capabilities developers will need to create services for in code-oriented environments. They then need to make these capabilities available to everyone to embed into applications. The Salesforce platform includes Heroku – a tightly integrated high control cloud platform for developers to build services and apps in any language that can then connect and be used in conjunction with the high productivity Force.com environment. This provides an end to end platform to innovate with both clicks and code without compromising the end user experience.

5)    The ecosystem and learning that no other platform provides

Transforming digitally takes more than your internal team of developers, whether they are citizen developers or traditional programmers. To move fast and deliver what your business needs you need pre-built, off the shelf apps, components, and solutions that you can easily integrate into your existing functionality. It could be something as simple as an eSignature capability or as complex as a custom app to run a batch work to automatically encrypt your sensitive data. The Salesforce ecosystem includes more than 4000 AppExchange apps built on our platform to help you deliver complete digital experiences for your employees and customers.

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