How Salesforce’s Cloud Differs From Other Clouds

By Laura Fagan, Sr. Manager Product Marketing, Salesforce

For 15-plus years, cloud computing companies such as Salesforce has defined the cloud computing space. Companies big and small depend on cloud technology to drive business processes and better connect to customers.

To really understand what makes Salesforce’s cloud different from other cloud providers, you need to take a closer look at the Salesforce1 Platform on which it sits, and more specifically, Force.com.

As a next-gen Platform as a Service (PaaS), Force.com serves as the foundation for the Salesforce products you know and likely use on a regular basis, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and AppExchange. Force.com is many things: fast, scalable, customizable, secure, and reliable. And it supports more than 100,000 organisations and two billion transactions per day.

How Force.com Works

How does Salesforce do it all? The answer is Force.com’s metadata-driven software architecture and the way that innovation powers multi-tenant application development. Multi-tenancy is kind of like an apartment building. Residents get the benefits of sharing the main framework, but still have the privacy they want, thanks to walls and doors.

Salesforce was actually the first to use a combination of groundbreaking technologies specifically designed for clouds with multi-tenancy. This unique infrastructure means IT doesn’t have to spend time managing hardware and maintenance. It’s also ultimately what enables Salesforce to deliver continuous innovation with three releases a year.

Now, instead of worrying about upgrades and maintenance, your focus can be on building applications that help your business and organization go faster. One of the coolest things about developing apps with Force.com is that you don’t have to be a coder. Everything developers and business users need to build, update, and customize apps is available in our point-and-click user interface or in the Salesforce Web browser-based developer environment.

The Secret Sauce

The key to all of the above is Salesforce’s metadata-driven software architecture. Force.com uses a run-time engine that forms app data from metadata, basically data that is about the data. There is a clear separation between tenant data, the platform itself, and the metadata specific to each app, so when they deliver three automatic upgrades a year, nothing breaks on your end, including customisations.

This also holds true if another tenant customizes an object or app UI. Even adding tens of thousands of new tenants to Force.com will not slow run-time. What does this mean for your business? It means it’s easy to customize and easy to make changes. Apps stay current with all the business processes. No matter how big you grow or how many customers you add, you can trust Force.com to keep your IT infrastructure future-ready.

Article first appeared on the Salesforce blog.

Lava is a cloud solutions provider and an authorised Salesforce Partner in Malaysia. We have more than a decade of experience in cloud solutions which includes marketing automation, CRM implementation, change management, and consultation. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.