This morning we launched the Salesforce1 Customer Platform, a new breed of platform designed to build apps for the Internet of Customers. It’s a new era where every app and every device a business creates establishes and grows an intimate relation with the customer using it. For the developer, Salesforce1 is a set of incredibly powerful platform services, APIs, and an app container to eliminate the pain of building mobile apps for business.

The world of apps has changed from transactions to experiences. Successful businesses know they must engage in a much deeper and more personal way with their customer than ever before. Traditional platforms simply were not designed for these next generation apps where every interaction on every device is tied back to a single customer record that sales, service, marketing, IT all interact with. By providing this single customer record, Salesforce1 unleashes an amazing opportunity for developers to build apps that were simply not possible before.

Salesforce1 is built for developers. You can use the tools and languages you already know and love to take that transactional data and turn it into a conversation. If you are a Force.com developer, use your existing skills and turbocharge the creation of employee-facing mobile apps. If you are a Heroku developer building apps with Ruby or Node.js, an iOS or Android developer, or even a HTML5 and JavaScript web developer you can code apps that utilize Salesforce1 as a suite of trusted backend services to access the customer record and turn anonymous consumer apps into engaging apps that your customers love. And you can do it all now!

APIs to connect to everything
Salesforce1 delivers functionality API-first. If you create a report on Salesforce1 using the drag & drop tools, it is available as a RESTful service delivering data via JSON. If you create a database object, you automatically get a RESTful endpoint; everything is protected using a single, powerful identity model, meaning you can spend more time building apps, not plumbing. Salesforce1 is also designed for the future demands of developers – connecting to not just web and mobile apps, but millions of devices. With support for web sockets, streaming data, and massive scale, developers have the APIs and cloud services to create apps we haven’t even imagined yet.

Social data
Think for a moment what your favorite apps are on your smart phone or tablet. I bet every one of them lets you connect with your friends or collegues, or use a service in a mobile-first way. For business apps, social data means more than just people – it means being connected to data, to business processes, and the enterprise social graph. Salesforce1 leverages Salesforce Chatter and the Chatter REST API to make every aspect of your application and data inherently social.

Declarative and programmatic development
Salesforce1 lets you build mobile apps incredibly quickly. Part of the ability to deliver this breakthrough productivity is achieved by unlocking the potential of everyone to build apps. If you are a business user you can make mobile apps using drag and drop tooling for creating schemas, workflows, reports, and much more – all of them instantly exposed as RESTful endpoints.


If you are a developer, you can code in languages like Ruby, Node.js, Apex, Java, and even HTML5 and JavaScript and connect to the same apps made by the business. Gone are the days of disconnected, or throw away apps; developers can now build apps connected right into the business that turn anonymous consumers into customers who love your apps, and your business. And now, with Heroku1, a core part of the Salesforce1 platform, building connected customer apps has never been easier!

Action-based app development
Salesforce1 allows you to create actions using declarative tools and have them appear on both web and mobile devices in an optimized way without developers having to write device-specific code. Actions can be thought of as tasks that a user typically performs based on some contextual information – a delivery driver using Salesforce1 might use an action that lets her quickly update an order, or specify an ETA for delivery. Actions let you get things done fast. Users will typically access actions right from within the enterprise social graph feed, but, just like everything else in Salesforce1, developers can access actions via open APIs to deliver apps running anywhere, in any language, and connected right into your customer platform to drive business success.

 

Enterprise mobile app container
Salesforce1 is also an app. It is an amazingly flexible container that you can create and distribute your custom apps to your employees and partners. Create an app using either the declarative or programmatic tools, let administrators specify permission sets to define which roles or profiles should be able to access your app, and with a simple pull-to-refresh, Salesforce1 now includes the new app in the left hand navigation menu. Salesforce1 even remembers users’ most recent apps and information, adjusting the order of items in the menu based on most recently used.

The launch of Salesforce1 unleashes the incredible potential of putting the customer at the center of every app. To learn much more about Salesforce1, and how you can build game-changing mobile apps for your customers, employees, and partners, make sure you check out the entirely new developer.salesforce.com site, grab your free Salesforce1 books from the #devzone at Dreamforce, and join us this Wednesday at 10:30am for the Salesforce1 Developer keynote for all the latest announcements and access to sample apps and code you can download right away and get started.

See you in the #devzone
@quintonwall

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