Enterprise cloud computing giants Salesforce.com has launched Salesforce Platform Mobile Services, a tool to help accelerate mobile app development for customers and partners on the Salesforce cloud platform.
The platform, which runs Salesforce CRM and, according to the company, is home to over three million custom apps and a million developers, is of course the cornerstone of one of tech’s giants.
The majority of cloudy polls put Marc Benioff’s company near the top, most notably being crowned the number one software as a service (SaaS) player last month – bearing in mind Salesforce was one of the founding fathers in the SaaS space and one of its closest rivals, Oracle, was reluctant to initially use the term ‘cloud computing’.
The open source Salesforce Mobile SDK 2.0 will be updated and available in June, allowing for a wide variety of options for developers.
These include added capabilities for HTML5-based apps, as well as nifty connectivity for enterprise data to any app, be it mobile, HTML5 or hybrid, and cross-operability for iOS and Android.
Another interesting addition includes a number of Developer Mobile Packs, enabling developers to access Salesforce.com’s APIs through JavaScript frameworks such as Angular JS, Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile.
The overall result, Salesforce hopes, will be that customers reduce costs hiring mobile specific developers, as well as there no longer being a trade off between a high quality app and speed of app developments.
“By combining the world’s leading customer platform with the mobile tools and frameworks developers love, we have made it possible for CIOs and web developers to deliver the mobile apps their customers, partners and employees are screaming for,” Mike Rosenbaum, Salesforce executive vice president, said in a canned quote.
Alongside all this, Salesforce is rolling out its Salesforce Mobile Accelerator Program, which sees partners Accenture, Aditi, Appirio, Bluewolf, Capgemini, Deloitte, Detroit Labs and Tquila give advice and training on app development.
How much of an innovation will this be for developers?
Update April 11: Adam Spearing, Salesforce’s EMEA AVP platform, told DeveloperTech that the “think mobile first” paradigm suited the tech giant’s strategy going forwards, encompassing both Fortune 500 companies and SMEs.
“We’ve got to provide technologies that allow them to operate in different ways”, Spearing said in a phone interview. “The Salesforce model isn’t ‘we only care for big companies’, we span the whole horizon.”
Regarding Salesforce’s updated SDK, Spearing noted that it was indicative of the company’s progression. “We’re a very disruptive company in the way we do things, and this is a good example of that.
“We’re freeing [developers] up from a lot of compromises and headaches they go through before they start building the app.”
