The Platform Commitment

At just slightly over a week ago, I traveled to New York for the launch and inaugural meeting of the Salesforce Platform Partner Advisory Board.

Salesforce has been running Customer Advisory Boards for a while but this is the first time they’ve held it for Partners and focused primarily on Platform.

I was fortunate enough to be selected as part of 12 people globally who will interact with Platform Product Management and leadership to help shape the product roadmap by providing feedback from the ground based on ours (and our extended teams’) extensive experience in implementing solutions for customers on the Salesforce Platform.

Out of the 12, the APAC region was well represented with Steven Herod (Accenture), Jannis Bott (DXC), James Keaney (Cludo) and myself (Mav3rik) in attendance. Overall, it was a good mixture of people ranging from those who are still very much “hands on” to others who are mostly managing their respective practices — everyone a Platform thought leader in their own right.

So what is the Platform?

If you’ve been following Mav3rik’s journey since we started you’ll be well aware of this by now, but to give a brief explanation — it’s the suite or set of capabilities that underpins the business applications that customers know and love about Salesforce. These capabilities include the User Interface (eg Lightning Web Components), Mobile, Foundation Services (eg Apex), Automation and much, much more. It’s the PaaS to the Salesforce SaaS offerings such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc and allows you to build mobile and web applications for specific use cases outside of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It is also what is commonly referred to nowadays (at least until the Marketing team decides to rebrand it) as Lightning Platform. And finally, it also encompasses Heroku — another Salesforce PaaS (on top of AWS) that our team is extremely passionate about and a big advocate of.

While I’m not at liberty to divulge details of the roadmap and the discussions that occurred, in general I can share that there are so many things to get excited about with the future of the Platform. Salesforce continues to invest heavily in almost all aspects from expanding the no code/low code features and in the process empowering the so-called “citizen developers”, to enhancing the developer experience even further thereby attracting more non-Salesforce developers into the ecosystem.

This was the first of many sessions throughout the year, with others to be done remotely. And although it took a long trip to get there, it was made worthwhile by all the insights we gained from each other. It also shows that we’re all well and truly committed to the ongoing betterment of the Salesforce Platform. Looking forward to the next!

#salesforce #platform #advisoryboard #lightningplatform #heroku

#beamav3rik