Build. Faster.

Covid-19 and the year FY20 has been very challenging for business of all sizes. For businesses, understanding new customer expectations and managing digital disruption while maintaining the profitability of legacy revenue streams is not only challenging but exhaustive. The growth of customer connections through sensors and mobile devices is exploding along with demand for managing and analyzing large data sets to obtain a deeper understanding of their interactions.

Customizable applications to accelerate the goal of enterprise digital transformation are in high demand fueled by changing business ecosystems.

Analyst firm, IDC interviewed twelve organizations that are using Salesforce as a platform for developing and delivering business applications and services to their employees and customers. According to these Salesforce customers, they are achieving the levels of agility and scalability needed from their application development efforts to match demand from their business operations, which leads to better business outcomes and operational efficiencies. In other words, their organizations are deriving value from more timely, functional, and robust business applications.

IDC projects that these organizations will realize business benefits worth an annual average of $242,272 per 100 users over five years, which would result in a five-year return on investment (ROI) in Salesforce of 478% by:

• Generating more revenue by addressing business opportunities with more tailored business applications in less time
• Driving higher user productivity through earlier delivery of high-performing business applications that leverage business data
• Increasing the productivity of application development teams by providing an easy-to-use, robust application development platform
• Optimizing the use of IT staff time and IT infrastructure by using the cloud-based Salesforce platform-as-a-service solution

To enable digital transformation of its customers, Salesforce provides a portfolio of services to support and accelerate application development. Some services are meant for users with minimal technology experience (often in line of business) with a low/no-code approach, while others target professional developers offering complete control of application functionality and the choice of multiple languages. Data analytics can be used to understand customer interactions and trigger both desktop and mobile applications. Salesforce fully abstracts infrastructure, removing the traditional time lags and complexity of delivering these types of solutions.

Salesforce recognizes the need for enterprises to focus on technology and the importance of applications to drive digital transformation. These cater to the needs of different types of application builders ranging from citizen to professional developers.
Salesforce offers a scalable, trusted platform that serves over 150,000 customers and processes over 4BN transactions per business day. The platform serves customers across all time zones with high performance resiliency and provides cutting-edge Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) capabilities to build hybrid apps with fine-grained network control.

Specialized runtimes serve particular styles of computing: Heroku for scalable (or "elastic") tasks; Force.com for business-data focused tasks; and Thunder for processing event-driven streams of data. Complete abstraction and automation of infrastructure lets developers focus on building apps instead of remaining mired in otherwise manual tasks like database management, workload configuration, security patches, and operating system upgrades.

Salesforce supports secure sharing of identity across users, profiles, and organizations. This security and sharing context reduces application development time and complexity. Shield provides protections including encryption-at-rest, event monitoring, field audit trail, and transaction security. Other than geographic recognition like FedRamp and TUV Rhineland, Force.com has earned certifications like ISO 27001/27018, SSAE 16/ISAE 3402 SOC-1, SOC 2/3, PCI-DSS, TRUSTe Certified Privacy Seal, and CSA STAR.

Integration with external business sources increases the business value of application portfolios. Salesforce provides multiple options for integration, including Salesforce Connect which exposes on-premises or cloud-based data through the industry-standard OData protocol, with no coding. Customers access their business data on a "by-reference" basis instead of through traditional integration techniques. AppExchange Connectors are products that can be directly added to Salesforce environments to connect to legacy data. Files Connect manages access to content stores (including SharePoint, Box, and Google Docs) and leverages federated search identity and access control. And APIs support a standard set of Web Service-based APIs, including SOAP, REST, Steaming, Bulk, and Metadata, all to reduce development effort and time.

With Salesforce services ranging from integration to Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile delivery, there is an increasing need for application development resources to be skilled in these competencies. Salesforce recognizes the need to expand the pool of developer talent and via Trailhead delivers a free self-service training platform to enable any motivated employee to develop and deliver applications. With tutorials broken up into small pieces, the time investment for training is reduced for individuals that are often already engaged in other important activities.

Salesforce is updated three times a year, helping enterprises keep on top of technology changes for transforming their business. These updates make it a platform that can constantly adapt to user needs and give enterprises a continuously increasing range of components available to meet their needs.

Business Value Highlights

*IDC Report Stats

At Dextara, helping customer experience success through Salesforce is our only mission and thats' the sole reason why we exist. We're successful when our customers are successful. And with Platform development, successful product and app development for businesses is our passion and is at the heart of everything we do.

For our clients, it is really the speed to deliver, the lack of infrastructure, and the flexibility to develop in an interactive and agile manner that led them to Salesforce platform and Dextara to build the same at the shortest possible time.

Industry Analyst, IDC's analysis of organizations' who have built applications on Salesforce platform shows that they are leveraging it to create more value for their organizations from business applications. In particular, these organizations are benefiting from making their application development efforts more flexible, efficient, and capable of matching the velocity of their business operations. As a result, IDC calculates that these organizations will realize value with the Salesforce platform worth an average of $242,272 per 100 users ($4.04 million per organization) in the following areas:

• Business productivity benefits. Interviewed organizations are delivering timely, functional, and high-performing applications and new features to their users and customers. Consequently, they reported winning more business and making their employees more productive. IDC projects that interviewed organizations will realize benefits from increased revenue and higher user productivity worth an average of $129,021 per 100 users ($2.15 million per organization) per year over five years.
• IT staff productivity benefits. Interviewed organizations' application development teams require much less time per new application and application feature, which increases their organizational value. Further, moving to a PaaS solution with Salesforce means that less IT staff time is needed to manage infrastructure supporting applications. IDC calculates that these organizations will achieve IT staff–related time savings and higher productivity worth an average of $87,761 per 100 users ($1.46 million per organization) per year over five years.
• Risk mitigation — user productivity benefits. Applications developed on the Salesforce platform experience fewer unexpected outages, which limits productivity losses and potential business losses. IDC puts the value of limiting productive employee time and revenue losses due to unplanned downtime at an annual average of $20,674 per 100 users ($344,600 per organization) per year over five years.
• IT infrastructure cost reductions. Interviewed organizations require fewer test and production servers with the cloud-based Salesforce platform, enabling them reduce costs associated with developing and delivering applications. IDC expects interviewed organizations to reduce IT infrastructure–related costs by an average of $4,816 per 100 users ($80,300 per organization) per year over five years.

organizations interviewed by IDC, confirmed the impact of Salesforce on their application development efforts:

• An e-Retailer explained: "It depends on the application, but it takes about three to four months on average to develop an application with Salesforce; if we were doing that kind of product in-house, it would be six to seven months … If it's a brand-new application, it would take less than a week to actually deploy on Salesforce; it might take two to three weeks with another approach for the first install."
• A born-in-the cloud organization noted: "Speed of iteration is a huge benefit with Salesforce, or agile development, because we are able to deliver faster and deliver new applications. You can do this with other providers, but Heroku simplifies it greatly … it makes it really easy to update your application … [and] simplifies the workflow for your developers to verify changes and stage them on a server."
• These organizations have moved to Salesforce from a variety of development platforms and solutions but were unanimous in describing how Salesforce has enabled their application development efforts and in realization of high ROI and a real faster time-to-market.