Communities is built on top of the Chatter social platform and covers a number of different functional opportunities – sales, marketing, service and specific verticals that particular businesses may have. As my compatriot and IDC Analyst focusing on the social space Vanessa Thompson pointed out:

Over time, communities will evolve with processes associated to the community becoming embedded in core business workflow processes Salesforce Communities is able to build on the strong base of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud to extend specific workflow and enable an ongoing conversation with customers, partners and suppliers

MyPOV

There is no doubt in my mind that this blending of customer facing with core back office data is a taste of the way enterprise software will look in the future – a plethora of drivers means that organizations have no option but to embrace their consumers closer to the organization and let their sentiment and commentary flow directly into internal conversations, product development and corporate culture. That said, the reality within an organization is that back office is handled by the IT, HR and financial departments while customer facing assets are firmly in the sales and marketing camp. For communities to really be successful – there is a huge amount of cultural change that needs to occur – not only do the technology silos need to be broken down, but so too do the organizational silos need to be.

This speaks directly to a current debate around who will control the majority of IT spend in the future – many believe this responsibility will remain firmly with the CIO. More forward looking predictions suggest however that it will be the CMO that controls much of this spend and, hence, customer facing assets will become a key part of the businesses internal systems. I’m reminded of fellow New Zealand and current CMO of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (disclosure – CBA is a consulting client) Andy Lark’s comments during the keynote last year at DreamForce. Lark is an excellent example of what I believe will be the future of enterprise IT – a CMO that is a central figure in the procurement and development of both customer facing solutions, and the core technologies that enable those solutions.

The jury is out on how long this new type of enterprise will take to rise and likely it will be longer than Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff would like – that said, Salesforce Communities is a key enabling tool and I’m looking forward to hearing the case studies that will now doubt be writ large at this year’s DreamForce in November.

Their product, Tylr Mobile, is an enterprise mobile platform that seeks to connect existing, well utilized but ultimately siloed tools into one process-savvy mobile application. The theory behind the company’s first product, WorkinBox, is that today’s main mobile application is email – which, despite its ubiquity, is a poor tool given the fact that it lacks context, is incredibly noisy and is siloed with poor interaction with the systems of record an enterprise uses. WorkinBox is focused on helping salespeople tie their two main applications, email and CRM, into one seamless, context-rich and agile experience.

I was given a sneak preview of the product and I have to say it’s user experience is exquisite. The experience is not unlike Mailbox, the smash hit email app that Dropbox acquired recently – but a UI, no matte how beautiful it looks, doesn’t make a difference if the core proposition for the product is unsound.

Unsurprisingly given Nichol’s background and experience, WorkinBox makes total sense. The idea is to connect the emails related to particular opportunities, accounts and contacts, and deliver them in one integrated screen that allows users to take actions and track progress between email and their CRM. Say an email comes in from a prospect asking for a soft copy of a recent presentation, WorkinBox has all the communications relating to that opportunity in one window so the salesperson can find the particular file, attach it to a reply and, most importantly, have the opportunity updated within Salesforce. No more replying to emails with a “I’ll find it when I’m in the office” or worse, no more being unable to communicate with customers in a timely manner, WorkinBox captures the history, communication streams and context behind a relationship. It’s application convergence delivered in a logical manner.

To an extent WorkinBox begs some core questions about the assumption that more and more communication is happening off email. This is, to an extent a realistic viewpoint but also somewhat limited. If WorkinBox had the ability to capture customer communications from channels other than email (SMS, voice, Twitter for example) it would more nicely fit in with the multi channel message that social protagonists are articulating. The reality however is that business is still done via email – it’s the way that the overwhelming majority of communication occurs. But therein lies the rub. The overwhelming majority of communication happens via email, and within Outlook – convincing salespeople to ditch their regular modes of working for a new way of looking at the world will be hard. I suspect that the company realizes this and is considering how their approach towards integrated email and CRM would play in a desktop application world – perhaps an Outlook plugin for those who are forever wedded to the staple app of salespeople?

WorkinBox is launching today at the demo conference and is being released as an iPhone app – one assumes that other platforms won’t be far behind. The concept, and the execution thus far is highly compelling – it strikes me that, once again, Nichols may have picked a winner – this is the sort of product that would find a very happy home under Salesforce itself – I’d not be surprised if the company didn’t snap them up rapidly.

It’s an accepted fact that consumers are transacting a growing proportion of their online commerce via mobile devices but this has been slow to translate to enterprise-level applications. In part this is because customarily enterprise data is trapped in silos that are often difficult to connect to the outside world. In a world where data is increasingly the most valuable asset an organization holds, opening this data up and allowing business units to utilize it in new ways is critical. And, it goes without saying, many of these new ways of utilizing data will be on a mobile device.

So, what does this new Salesforce platform actually deliver? The new platform has two services:

• Salesforce Mobile SDK 2.0 - The open source project is designed to make it easy for any enterprise developer to securely connect enterprise data to any mobile app – native, hybrid or HTML5 – on any iOS or Android device. The SDK also enables HTML5-based apps to leverage device features like the camera and geolocation, and provides additional libraries for key enterprise requirements such as authentication and secure offline storage.
• Developer Mobile Packs - These open source “quick start” packs enable any web developer to build highly responsive HTML5 or hybrid mobile apps on any platform and access real-time Salesforce data. Mobile Packs leverage the massively scalable and trusted Salesforce Platform REST APIs through a choice of popular, lightweight JavaScript frameworks – AngularJS, Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile – to offer greater development flexibility and deliver amazing data-centric mobile experiences.

Alongside the product announcement, Salesforce is announcing a program for consulting and implementation partners, perhaps as a acknowledgement that in the enterprise world, there is a distinct lack of understanding of the why/how and what of mobile app enablement. The new mobile accelerator program is a consulting partnership with company’s such as Appirio, Bluewold and Capgemini.

MyPOV

Eureka – Enterprises, whether they know it or not, have no option but to embrace agile methodologies, point solutions, and mobile applications. By bringing together consulting services along with holistic development tools, Salesforce is helping move traditional enterprises into the mobile world. That said I do have some questions – the company is strongly articulating the open source nature of the mobile packs – it hopes to build some community momentum around the initiative. While this is a logical move from Salesforce’s perspective, it is somewhat dissonant to see such a strong open source messaging around mobile development whose very value proposition lies embedded in proprietary data and core applications.

I don’t believe that Salesforce needed to put this open source spin on things. Enterprises, in my experience, realize that they need to start thinking mobile and are looking for partners who can help them bridge the gap from where they are today to a more mobile-enabled model. By tying together core data alongside mobile app development tools – Salesforce makes it something of a no-brainer for enterprises to begin their mobile journey.

MuleSoft rightly points out that APIs have created a kind of common language for the way enterprises will work into the future. The number of open APIs available is rapidly increasing and alongside these open APIs, there are a plethora of enterprise applications and data sources that, regardless whether they are on-premise or off, need to be connected to other applications. MuleSoft is betting that organizations will look to integration vendors to provide a broad platform that covers both what we consider integration to be today (give me a plug in to connect salesforce to NetSuite for example) but also that covers integration of a more distributed nature (let me connect these sensors with this analytics dashboard alongside our back office ERP system).

The platform is built as an integrated set of individual products. Users can utilize the bits of the platform that are of relevance to them, but also give themselves a roadmap in terms of their future technological direction. The different functional pieces are:

• Anypoint technology – enables point-to-point integration,

• CloudHub – A so-called integration platform as a service (iPaaS), offering the ability for enterprises to integrate SaaS applications with each other or to on-premise applications, as well as allowing SaaS providers to build and offer packaged integration applications that automate business processes across applications
• Mule ESB – An integration platform for connecting enterprise applications on-premise and to the cloud, eliminating the need for custom point-to-point integration code
• Anypoint Connectors – Out-of-the-box connectivity to hundreds of enterprise and SaaS applications
• API Solution – Built on top of the CloudHub iPaaS, this is a solution for designing, building, publishing, securing, managing and monetizing internal services and external APIs, as well as engaging the developer community around APIs:

• APIkit – New open source API design toolkit that helps developers generate consistent APIs that adhere to best practices, eliminating uncertainty and friction in creating new APIs
• Anypoint Service Registry – Announcing general availability today, a service registry and the easiest way for enterprises to govern and manage all of their internal services and APIs, both on-premise and in the cloud offering visibility, enforcement and lifecycle control
• API Manager – Newly released as beta today, a cloud-based API management cloud service allows enterprises to connect with business partners and create new revenue channels through a secure and scalable API strategy
• APIhub – A public repository and community for APIs, which allows developers and enterprises to discover and use over 13,000 APIs, and enables API providers to publish and document APIs, engaging the developer community on an open, collaborative platform
• Unified development experience – Designed to offer away to build integration applications, for deployment either on-premise or in the cloud

• Mule Studio – Graphical design environment for creating integration flows, making any developer into an integration developer
• Anypoint DataMapper – Graphical data mapping and transformation, enabling point-and-click data integration for SaaS and on-premise applications
• Anypoint Connector DevKit – Developer toolkit that allows developers to build Anypoint Connectors from any API in hours or days, not weeks

That’s a whole heap of technology and a fair few buzzwords to boot, but despite all that, MuleSoft is onto something here. Innovation in the future is going to rely on not only applications talking to each other but also the ability to interface between a plethora of different data sources and applications themselves. APIs are creating that connectivity and a broad based integration platform that includes both integration as we’ve always thought of it, alongside the mechanics to build and run a broad API suite, is a compelling proposition – as the number of possible endpoints increases – enterprises will increasingly look to deliver a consistent way to combine the different elements of those endpoints – to this end, MuleSoft is positioning itself smartly to compete in the new look enterprise.

Apparently investors agree with this perspective since the second piece of news today is that MuleSoft has raised an additional $37M, led by NEA. This round brings MuleSoft’s funding to date to a massive $81M and includes such luminaries as salesforce.com (a new investor), Hummer Winblad, Morgenthaler, Lightspeed, SAP Ventures and Bay Partners According to the company, the funds will be used to fuel the company’s aggressive growth plans across both SaaS and enterprise parts of the business – which means we’re going to see a lot more enterprise sales folks pitching MuleSoft to blue chip customers.

Integration is one of the areas I’m picking for massive growth over the next few years – an integration play that is well positioned to capture the growth in connected sensors and devices is placing itself strongly to become a force to be reckoned with – MuleSoft will be one to watch moving forwards.

The company’s new architecture is being integrated into Engine Yard Cloud. The idea behind the new approach, is that developers will be able to more easily choose components and services offered by Engine Yard or include their own. In a pre-emptive strike against Heroku who, despite indications is yet to introduce hosting beyond Amazon Web services, Engine Yard’s multi-infrastructure support will allow developers to comparison shop for resources and select their preferred infrastructure provider in the future. In a following move to many Cloud Foundry players, developers also will be able to deploy in a public, private or hybrid cloud Finally this release see Engine Yard customers have access to an increasing variety of languages, operating systems, databases and more.

So – to specific functionality, this new release includes:

• Cluster model – developers can create purpose-built clusters for faster provisioning, configuration and deployment. Developers can currently run database clusters, and in the future, they will be able to deploy clusters of application and utility processes; clusters within an environment can be spread across multiple regions for disaster recovery
• Infrastructure abstraction – with an infrastructure abstraction layer now in place, developers will benefit from an increasing number of IaaS provider options in the future, as well as options for running on hybrid and private clouds
• Monitoring and Alerting – an automatic monitoring and alerting agent is now included with all new Engine Yard Cloud deployments. The new monitoring capabilities provide incident data on applications, components and other processes running on a developer’s virtual machine. In addition, alerts and monitoring information is available for virtual resources in the infrastructure, including CPU, memory and disk
• A new dynamic User Interface – the new UI provides a structured experience that helps developers build a stable architecture, as well as adapt to their growing resource needs
• New Blueprint Approach – three new blueprints allow developers to standardize their application environments using Engine Yard proven best practices. The new predefined blueprints give developers the flexibility to choose the size of their environments as well as add or remove clusters from an environment or components from clusters

MyPOV

More choice, more flexibility, more control – what’s not to like? At face value this should be a move which sees Engine Yard claw back recognition. The reality however is more nuanced than that – mind share and market attention go a long way to helping customers make their buying decisions, and Engine Yard is up against the might of Salesforce (pushing Heroku as the PaaS of choice) and the huge ecosystem forming behind Cloud Foundry. That said, Engine Yard does have a small but loyal following and their recent funding from Oracle should, so long as they make the right decisions, see them gain awareness in the larger enterprises that form Oracle’s customer base.

Beyond the softer measures of market success however are some bottom line issues – going by these, this release is a very strong move for Engine Yard. Enterprises are looking to platforms that meet their needs in terms of infrastructure and, more and more, this means that private or hybrid cloud are an important piece of the puzzle. likewise, despite enterprises being attracted to the PaaS story of “abstracting infrastructure away from the customer”, enterprises are still uncomfortable with not having fine grained control of their architecture and components – it’s a sensitive balancing act, ensuring automation and abstraction while still allowing for control. Time will tell whether Engine Yard have found the ideal balance point between these conflicting drivers. For more on the discussion of these two conflicting aims, see the excellent discussion about composable versus contextual systems by James Urquhart.

Recently Chartio announced support for Salesforce – clear and sexy meets core enterprise systems of record. What’s not to like? So what does the integration actually mean? Salesforce users have the ability to:

• View Salesforce Data Alongside Other Data Sources – view Google Analytics and other production databases like Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL alongside Salesforce data
• Seeing Salesforce Data in Charts and Dashboards in Real-Time – a real-time view of Salesforce data in charts and dashboards
• Interacting with Salesforce Data – Chartio allows users to drill down into their data to understand the raw data and also filter data through date ranges

While cloud companies tend to articulate a “all the data, the way you want it and in real time” story, the reality is sometimes a little different. Currently, for example, Salesforce only allows users to see a dashboard or report daily, weekly or monthly. It’s also got a somewhat traditional enterprise approach to depicting information. Of course that will change over time, but a pure play visualization company will always deliver a more customizable and attractive dashboard by virtue of their core focus.

MyPOV

I love what Chartio is doing – giving organizations the ability to display the data that is most meaningful to them, and in a way which really ensures its clarity, is a winning formula. That said, it is often the case with dashboarding and visualization products that users focus on the “pretty” and less so on the “relevant and valuable”. One only needs to look at the boon of infographics that appears all over the place to see this in practice – many of these infographics are light on substance but heavy on visual bling. That’s not a criticism of the Chartio proposition, but rather a reflection that no dashboard tool will remove the need for good thought and analysis into what is the right data to expose and how best to do that.

That said, this integration will prove very valuable to many organizations, especially so since it gives them the ability to dashboard and chart not only from salesforce but also from their other systems (Google analytics for example). Of course the real value comes when a tool like this supports all the systems of record that an organization uses – and to this end Chartio needs to ramp up the pace of their integration efforts to keep adding more systems.

The other factor is that I suspect tools like Chartio will, once they have proven themselves in the marketplace somewhat, become targets for acquisition from companies that wish to add this sort of functionality to their products. Salesforce is an obvious candidate but so to are the integration vendors – either way, the future looks pretty rosy for Chartio.

Of course this sort of rogue IT isn’t ideal – it means that a huge number of different solutions are in use within the organization, that costs can spiral out of control and that no due-diligence has occurred as to the security, reliability and robustness of the solutions being used. But what is a business to do? Historically, getting servers deployed takes weeks because of interminable processes. Software evaluations may take a few days from the business end but then get bogged down in weeks of security and compliance checks by IT. It doesn’t meet the needs of the business who every day are being pressured to do more, for less.

But let’s look at it from IT’s perspective for a moment. They’re tasked with ensuring that all the various pieces of technology within an organization work within some security constraints. They’re responsible for ensuring that data, the most valuable thing an organization has, stays in its rightful place, and finally they’re busy making sure the organization gets the best bang for its buck – having dozens of individual business units sign up for different cloud services is, in their mind at least, risky, expensive and tantamount to an invitation to data loss.

Perhaps the time has come to not look at this as such a binary conversation – after all these two groups, IT and the business, aren’t exactly at war. IT wants to enable the business to meet its objectives. True it can be a little abrasive in its approach (hey, IT staff tend to be generalized as not having a high degree of social skills after all) but fundamentally it aims to deliver the solutions the business needs, to help the business achieve its strategic outcomes and all the while deliver these solutions in a way that doesn’t put the business at risk. IT is about safety first, and deliver second.

The business shares many of these objectives. After all no business unit wants to do anything that puts the organization at risk, they don’t want to introduce a vector for data loss, nor do they want to increase the cost burden on their organization. What they do want to do is achieve their business aims as quickly, and easily, as possible. If we had to characterize them as a class, we’d say that the business unit is all about delivery first, and safety second.

Building a Bridge

So how would it look if we took these two groups – IT with it’s security first and delivery second approach – and the business unit, with its delivery first and security second approach, and gave them solutions that allowed both of them to meet their objectives, but in a way that also delivered the priority seen as most important to the group on the other side of the chasm. In other words, how do we enable IT to deliver solutions in an agile manner, happy in the knowledge that they are inherently secure? And how do we enable the business to choose inherently secure solutions, happy in the knowledge that they’ll be delivered in an agile way?

Of course the industry is partially to blame for the existence of this chasm between the two groups. Traditional vendors, those selling directly to IT, have been quick to articulate at great length and in no uncertain terms just how much of a threat this new generation of cloud tools poses to the organization. The traditional diet of fear, uncertainty and doubt has consisted of a million and one thinly veiled messages telling enterprise that by enabling business unit self-provisioning they open themselves up to mass risk.

And the new breed of vendors have also had some guilt to shoulder. Rather than encourage a positive relationship between IT and the business, they have been quick to pour scorn on IT’s very ability to deliver, its awareness of how social, mobile and cloud are fundamentally changing the needs the business has. These new vendors, in an effort to encourage the very rogue IT that corporate IT is worried about, have presented a black and white choice where businesses have little option but to acquire solutions by subterfuge in order to achieve their aims.

A Third Way

There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. A new generation of vendors are coming on line who realize that in order to build viable and sustainable businesses they need to find a message and a delivery mechanism that allows both sides of the debate – IT and the business – to achieve its objectives without undermining the objectives of the other side. Vendors who realize that business self-service can happen in a way that is sympathetic to IT’s need for governance, security, visibility over cost and integration with legacy systems. Vendors who understand that IT-centric tools can also be built in such a way as to enable the business to gain a degree of autonomy over their day to day operations.

Some good examples exist – companies like enStratus are allowing enterprise IT to deliver their businesses a self-service portal to manage their cloud infrastructure. This is done with the buy-in and approval of IT, who are happy that their important requirements around governance and control are maintained. Cloudability are helping enterprises to gain insight into their overall cloud spend so that the financial and budgetary requirements of the organization can be met without reducing business units’ ability to self-determine. And here at Appsecute we’re creating a bridge whereby individual developers and teams of developers have the autonomy to use the tools that best suit their particular objectives, but to do so in a way that gives central IT visibility and audit control over what they’re doing.

The future has to be one in which the massive tensions that exist between IT and the business unit are resolved – companies that find ways to meet the needs of both sides of the divide help to move the discussion from one of risks, problems and barriers to one of rewards, benefits and outcomes.

Two examples of this are being announced today – one fairly humdrum ad one a tad more interesting. First the humdrum one – Cloud Sherpas is announcing it has acquired Innoveer solutions a well-known CRM consulting firm that has over 750 customers. This is interesting since Cloud Sherpas only very recently moved beyond its former pure-play Google Apps focus into Salesforce work – they did so with real pace however, offering advisory, implementation, integration and development services. This acquisition gives Cloud Sherpas a broader Salesforce presence in the US as well as the UK along with a large delivery team based out of India.

More interesting than this news however is the announcement that Cloud Sherpas is following on from its move in the Salesforce world and adding ITSM skills through the acquisition of Navigis, an advisory and consulting practice focusing on ServiceNow implementations. David Northing, CEO of Cloud Sherpas speaks to the company’s desire to become more of a provider of a suite of solutions to customers – speaking about the Navigis deal he said that:

Many of our customers have expressed an interest in cloud ITSM software, and acquiring Navigis – a strong operation that’s generating good profit and has doubled in size year over year – boosts our ability to support these companies. Between Google, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow, we’re establishing a ‘Sherpa stack’ of the top cloud solutions.

Navigis has been involved in IT Service Management since 1996. The company’s certified ServiceNow consultants provide implementations, customizations, administrative support and training to help ServiceNow customers automate their IT operations. Navigis clients include Fortune 500 customers.

What does this all mean?

No man is an island entire unto himself and increasingly no individual cloud solution is either. This aggregation of disparate but complementary solutions is a natural and necessary move as customers seek to take advantage of best of breed solutions, but with the support and help of one partner who can cover them all. Of course there is still the slight problem of the relative dearth of cash involved in these deals – I don’t have insight into Cloud Sherpas revenues or margin but I suspect that there isn’t much fat in these deals for them – what they are attempting to do (with success it would seem) is to mop up all the smaller players and build sufficient momentum to guarantee their existence going into the future.

No one knows what the services brokerage space will look like in the future – but it’s a reasonable bet to make that Cloud Sherpas will be there in some form.

Not being a developer – my comments come from a business perspective. That might be anathema to most developer purists, but I sense that what we’re seeing with high level PaaS’ like force.com (and, for that matter, the other SaaS-based highly flexible platforms, is an uber-democratization of development that will prove even more revolutionary for developers and business than IaaS has been for operational teams within an IT organization. That’s the reason I started differentiating application PaaS (aPaaS) from infrastructure PaaS (iPaaS)

Let’s see how that works. With cloud, organizations no longer need to think about procuring, racking and stacking servers. Rather they obtain their server needs on a utility basis from a cloud provider (in the case of the public cloud at least). CapEx is removed, the need for large operational teams goes, and all of a sudden the ability to acquire server time moves from central IT, down to tech teams within a business unit. All fine and good so far, but let’s get to the next stage, PaaS.

In the old days, a business that wanted to, for instance, create a custom application that integrated with its ERP or CRM, would have needed to engage a developer with a deep understanding of both development languages and the hooks into the software package being integrated with. With aPaaS that is no longer the case. The platform itself is built upon the application and hence is already integrated with the core data the organization is trying to use. The language is easy enough for most business people to use and hence they do, creating applications at will.

This concept, of aPaaS being the catalyst for massive democratization, was well articulated in a recent post that went out on a significant limb by saying that “Force.com is the next Visual Basic”. Rather than an insult however, the author stresses that reactions to force.com replay many of the those that went alongside the introduction of VB a couple of decades ago:

• Most professional C++ programmers dismissed it. VB was a “toy language” or a “glue language” for components – not for serious software development.
• Increasing number of software engineers embraced the language because, to put it simply, when it came to desktop applications you could be an order of magnitude more productive in VB than in C++. It may not have had the stature and features of a “real” professional language, but it sure was profitable to work in it.
• VB was easy enough for anyone to use, so everyone did. Doctors, lawyers, students – millions of VB developers sprang up out of nowhere and wrote a lot of code. Much of it was very bad code, but that’s what happens when a bunch of amateurs get in the game. Entire book, magazine and training industries grew up to help them get better, and many of them did and built entire careers around the platform.

The very reason VB was productive is important to remember in light of the rise of PaaS generally and these high level aPaaS’ in particular. The original post detailed the traits that force.com shows that were so starkly on display at this year’s DreamForce:

• A web based GUI environment that provides a high level of abstraction for developing real applications that seamlessly integrate core features like database, email, reporting, the web, chat and mobile.
• An environment that lets you do a great deal without code, but provides the language and “hooks” that allow serious programmers to go much farther.
• A flood of non-programmers who are using the environment to solve real problems, and who are stumbling into actual programming.
• Lots of truly awful code being written, so there’s a huge need for training and a thirst for knowledge on how to do things correctly.
• A language and platform that doesn’t seem to get much respect from the “real” programmers doing Java, C# or other languages, even though the demand (and pay) for Force.com and Apex programmers is huge.

It is true that, just like VB being under powered for some applications and needing a product like .NET to fill the gaps for particular needs, so too does force.com have its limitations. We’re always going to see “real” developers do the complex stuff – just look at the amazing number of applications being built of Heroku, AppFog, EngineYard et al – but that’s not the key point here. The key point is that the number of people globally who are now developing applications is ballooning, while the number of so called “professional” developers remains fairly stagnant. The thing that allows this to occur is a democratization, an increasing utility and, yes, a return to the simplicity of the Visual Basic days. It may not be a “real” development tool, but it’s one that is changing the very essence of what development is.

Part one and two of this series discussed the capabilities within Infrastructure & Operational services and Platform & Developer services required for a comprehensive PaaS solution designed for business success. This final article will conclude the discussion by looking at Business services and the importance of democratizing development and empowering users across the organization to rapidly deliver apps.

Business Services.

Capability: Declarative Business-Level Services

Without a doubt, developers are critical in building and delivering next generation apps, but any PaaS solution must also enable a hugely influential and highly productive part of the organization – the business users. Too often, solutions to business problems become technical problems, but this does not need to be the case. If there is one thing that I have seen during my time in I.T. is that the best way to give business users what they want is to empower them to deliver their own solutions.

A modern PaaS solution should not be limited to developer productivity and must support business level services including workflow, reporting, search, drag and drop schema creation, and more to ensure PaaS can be a successful alternative to the creation of unmanaged and adhoc databases and spreadsheets within the organization. This ability to support the democratization of app development and delivery must be a core component of the entire PaaS platform. Doing so, empowers business users to rapidly create apps that do not add to the IT backlog, without sacrificing the need to remain compliant with IT.

Capability: Simple, Social, Trusted Identity

Identity used to be synonymous with login and authentication. Now with the app-centric, mobile-first world that dominates our workplaces, identity is about providing access to the most current and relevant information possible. Comprehensive PaaS solutions support true multi-tenant approaches to data separation across tenants at an infrastructure service level, and extend upon this rich security context for an individual organization’s data by supporting managed sharing of data at a developer level all the way to business level requirements.

Identity should not be limited to a single provider, but should allow organizations to leverage existing identity services as well as embrace social services for authentication. Further, identity strategies must ensure that the administration of app connectivity can be managed centrally in an efficient manner.

Capability: Marketplaces To Sell, or Extend, Your Apps

The need for developer add-on services as well as business level marketplaces to discover new apps to extend your business is a critical part of an organization’s ability to delivering quicker time to market via PaaS. Successful organizations of tomorrow will not only leverage marketplaces, but also internalize some of the capabilities offered by leading PaaS providers to package and distribute their own apps and services both internally and externally. Re-use, once the exclusive domain of low level development efforts will become more prevalent as organizations, and in particular, lines of business, are able to deliver point-of-opportunity solutions which can be easily packaged, customized and offered to other areas of the business.

Summary

Too often however, organizations become mired in debates over the definition of what PaaS is, or isn’t. Part 1 of this series posed a simple questions “how will a technology [PaaS] will help your business.”.

Rather than focusing on the definition of what PaaS is, or what it is not, this series has focused on the capabilities of success made possible by a comprehensive PaaS solution. Organizations should understand, and identify, the capabilities required for their company to achieve business success needed to be a leader in their industry, both on a departmental level for tactical success and at a strategic corporate level. With a solid understand of the capabilities of what PaaS can deliver, only then can businesses unlock their potential to deliver game-changing apps, and answer the question of how can PaaS help its business.

About the Author – Quinton Wall is the Director of technical platform marketing at salesforce.com, and aspiring fantasy author. He is a regular speaker at cloud and developer events around the world, active contributor to open source projects, and the developer.force.com site. When he is not working with the salesforce platform, building mobile apps, or writing books, Quinton can be found on twitter (@quintonwall) sharing his thoughts 140 characters at a time.