Salesforce has been a world leading CRM platform for years. How come there are still people in business knowing nothing about this platform? We will try to change it and explain what Salesforce is. Is it a good opportunity to enter IT for juniors? What benefits does Salesforce provide for seasoned developers? These questions will be considered as well. Without further ado, let’s dive in!
WHAT IS SALESFORCE?
Salesforce was founded in 1999 by former Oracle CEO Mark Benioff. The main idea of its creation was to build affordable software as a service with online-only implementation.
Salesforce is a cloud-based platform offering a wide range of CRM capabilities, plus some interesting bonuses. It allows you to create and deploy custom solutions, automate business processes and integrate with external applications.
WHAT COMPANIES USE SALESFORCE ALREADY?
A great number of the world's leading companies are Salesforce customers and use this platform as a solution for their business needs. Adidas, AWS, Canon, Philips, Toyota, American Express, Western Union, Cisco, KLM and many others. Moreover, even US Visa Application Center uses Salesforce to collect, process and issue visa applications.
Salesforce is also a partner of some big players in the tech world, offering them ready-made integrations, advanced customer services and many other modern solutions. Among Salesforce parners are Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon.
7 MAIN SALESFORCE BENEFITS FOR DEVELOPERS
- Easy start
One of the biggest Salesforce advantages. No need to install any programs, no hardware requirements. Cloud hosting provides access to real-time information, meaning you can use the platform anywhere, anytime. All you need to start working is Internet access.
- Multiuser Platform
All Salesforce users share the same software and infrastructure. This allows for automatic and simultaneous updates for all users on the platform. Three times a year you get the latest and coolest features with automatic updates.
- Training Organization
Every Salesforce user has the opportunity to create a free organization for training, practice or testing. This is actually a full-featured development environment that can also be used to create your own products and release them as applications in AppExchange.
- AppExchange
AppExchange in Salesforce allows you to develop and sell your own products or access thousands of useful, secure and tested products or integrations created by other users.
- Highly integrative
Salesforce provides vast opportunities for integration. Moreover, many integrations are offered as built-in – for example, with Heroku, Outlook, Gmail.
- Flexible configuration
Intuitive and clear navigation bar. All tabs are divided by category. Main menu is divided into different sections depending on the purpose of use. For example, objects and fields are configured through Object Manager.
- Ready-made solutions
One of the biggest benefits of Salesforce is that a lot of the functionality that most of the products require has already been implemented and tested. For example, the built-in Email-to-Case functionality allows you to automatically create Case entries in the system from e-mail. Or Web-to-Lead, which creates an HTML form that you can paste into your website and create lead entries directly from the site.
SALESFORCE INNOVATIONS
Salesforce is a constantly evolving platform that offers you new opportunities to learn and improve. In 2010 they acquired one of the first cloud platforms – Heroku – allowing to deploy, run and manage applications written in various open languages and frameworks.
Recently, Salesforce has been actively integrating artificial intelligence (AI) elements into its platform. Technology uses all data within the system: customers data, e-mails, calendar and e-commerce data, as well as social networks streams, such as tweets and photos, to create machine learning models. One example of AI in Salesforce is the Einstein Bots for Service Cloud feature, which uses machine learning to provide better and faster customer care.
SALESFORCE CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
Salesforce specialist has the opportunity to grow and develop both in the technical direction and in project management/consulting. There are few good Salesforce professionals today, and they are all literally "worth their weight in gold". Money-wise, statistics show that the salary level of a Salesforce developer is higher than, for example, a Java or .NET specialist with the same experience.
IN A NUTSHELL
Analysts predict that the Salesforce will create more than 3 million jobs by the end of 2022. This puts the Salesforce among the world’s highly demanded and well-paid IT specializations.
So, both if you are embarking on a tech journey and already an experienced professional willing to broaden expertise, mastering Salesforce might be the next goal to consider.
