How Salesforce Became a Leader in Enterprise High Productivity Space

Earlier in the series, we discussed the factors that make Salesforce (CRM) an investment option in the SaaS and overall software space. In May 2017, Salesforce announced that it was placed in Gartner’s Leaders quadrant of its Enterprise hpaPaas (High Productivity Application Platform-as-a-Service) report.

App Cloud was the reason behind Salesforce’s placement in the Leaders quadrant in hpaPaaS. Forrester Research also designated Salesforce App Cloud as the leader among its peers in its March 2017 report.

App Cloud is an offshoot of CRM’s Salesforce 1 platform. Launched in September 2015, App Cloud now has more than 5.5 million apps and 2.3 million developers. It was designed specifically for the enterprise crowd. 

According to Salesforce, “The Salesforce1 Platform brings together Force.com, Heroku, and ExactTarget into one family of cloud services — all built API first — to help deliver apps that connect products, users, and next generation experiences.” 

Heroku, which is Salesforce’s application development platform, is hosted on Amazon’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services (or AWS).

Commenting on App Cloud, IDC Research analyst Al Hilwa stated, “With App Cloud, Salesforce is integrating Heroku a bit more deeply with its force.com traditional model-driven application platform.”

According to the results of a conducted by Sumo Logic, a data analytics company, companies preferred Microsoft (MSFT) Azure over Amazon (AMZN) in the IaaS[1. infrastructure-as-a-service] and PaaS[2. platform-as-a-service] spaces. Salesforce App Cloud was preferred by 28% of respondents, while 23% and 20% showed a preference for IBM Cloud (IBM) and Google Cloud (GOOG), respectively.