Many people ask me what’s Salesforce 1? Is that a new approach, new mobile app – replacing both Salesforce Touch and Mobile Chatter ? I wasn’t unfortunately at Dreamforce and could not find an easy response to that question until I’ve found a great analysis and discussion initiated by cloud analyst Esteban Kolsky. Read his explanation and understand that it’s not just a new mobile app.

It’s a new approach with focus on the power of the platform! Imagine writing  your applications once and running them on all devices with any interface. Imagine integrating with any other enterprise apps in days instead of months. That’s in my opinion the best gift that CIOs and developers could get for incomming Christmas.

1. Any client, anywhere can access any service offered by the platform. This means that once you authenticate with a platform, anything else you want to access that is trusted to that platform is also accessible (PaaS to PaaS integration is far safer and scalable than point-to-point integration or security as done today by monolithic solutions)
2. Any interface (mobile, computer, watch, a “thing” in the internet of things) can access the functions and data (once properly secured and authenticated) and display it – you cannot have an “internet of things” or even an “internet of customers” without an ecosystem of trusted platforms (well, not a sustainable one at least). This will lead to the rise of “atomized apps” (usually called apps). These apps are found in mobile devices and are single-function solutions that require no further logic (think about it this way, if your job involves checking people’s credit scores before approving an application for a loan – wouldn’t you prefer to have a simple app that does just that? If your smartphone or table can do it, why not your organization? It now can)
3. The concept of multi-tenancy finally disappears (yay – I cannot tell you how happy I am) together with the concept of multi-instances. We move to elastic single-instances with single-tenancy: each customer can have their own service (managed via systems management and metadata quite easily) and instantiate is as many times they need – and make any changes they want in the process. No longer are customers constrained (either in data model or functionality) to what’s offered as they can extend the functionality quite easily by making another service call (to any providers) without having to worry about changing the core service. (note: vendors will try to tell you how expensive this is as compared to multi-tenancy, but ask you yourself how “cheap” it was to use multi-tenancy and what benefits you as the customer derived from that – or read my previously linked post for that answer).
4. SFDC can create more modular “API calls”. They introduced this at the same time as S1 but they failed to mention why this was possible: any API is a library of many calls to different parts of the monolithic application to leverage their functions and data. API calls require complex transacting for security, scalability, and even integration that can reduce the granularity (read complexity or simplicity – either work – if you prefer) of how you can interact with it. By using services that leverage tokenized security and inheritances (core benefits of cloud computing) the calls can be far simpler, and far many more, while performing at the same or better level. Completing more service calls will use fewer resources and time that doing the same via API calls. Bottom line: you can use more granular functions with far less resources.
5. Incorporating Enterprise Application Stores (EAS) into Salesforce cloud computing deployment will allow any organization to create as many atomized apps as they would like to, thus reducing the complexity of the solutions used by the customers, the training and support costs, and enabling and empowering their customers to build and use their own “custom” version of the Enterprise Software they have running. The device and operating system they run is irrelevant as long they are supported in the EAS (SFDC announced, very quietly, the first version of their EAS at DreamForce).