Salesforce.com — best platform to develop enterprise software?

Salesforce.com, Google cloud platform, Amazon web services, and Microsoft Azure are only some platform as a service available in the market. With cloud going mainstream and hardware costs plummeting there are many right PAAS (platform as a service) options for developing products.

Below are some reasons why Salesforce.com is one of the best cloud platforms (if not the best) to develop enterprise products in 2018

1. Relentless customer focus — Salesforce as a public company has been long known to keep their customers at the center of their progress to becoming one of the most successful cloud software companies in the modern era. Below are some reasons why this became a reality
   — Click vs. code tools — Salesforce obsessively focuses on making a ton of several point & click tools to ensure clients can get their small or medium level customizations done without writing a single line of code. These tools also work with Salesforce’s vision around creating a collaborative environment where everyone with any skill set can take part in adding value to their clients (from IT to Partners to Consultants to Product Engineering).
   — Product management focus — As a strategy, the product management teams regularly collaborate directly with clients and partners to ensure requirements for the features they are building are clarified, and there are enough early adopters to get the features adopted.
   — Trailhead — Salesforce has created trailhead as a publicly available website to get training in topics as diverse as workplace diversity to technical topics like apex and aura. Trailhead allows them to seed the creation of a large community over the next decade like there is one for Apache foundation. Trailhead creates a diverse global skill force which salesforce adoption without salesforce having to sell their software.
   — Trust — Since founding salesforce has always put customer trust at the center of every product they have built or bought. They have created trust.salesforce.com which has the current status of every instance of every product they have across the globe. For any instance, a client or partner can (public) subscribe to emails for uptime and downtime intimations. For each downtime, salesforce puts out a public cause and what they do to avoid in future.
2. Disciplined innovation — Since Salesforce’s conception, they have believed in delivering value to existing customers and partners 3 times a year. Each release is entirely transparent and does not affect any live customer at all. They are free to adopt them when they want. In addition to building new features organically, they also buy at least 10 to 12 companies every year which leapfrogs salesforce.com to the next generation. Salesforce then integrates all the acquisitions to the same rigor and discipline of 3 releases a year. Salesforce has always thought very differently on what innovation means, and it has been a mix of discipline and inorganic growth.
3. Focus on values — Salesforce has a laser focus on their core values then short-term quarterly earnings. These core values allow Salesforce to stay focused on the long-term vision and strategy of changing how Salesforce wants to deliver software to its customers. Below are some of Salesforce’s core values.
   — Giving back — Salesforce takes pride in giving back to the communities they are in (like Indianapolis or California or London). They have a model called 1:1:1 model where they give 1% of their product, profit and time for the betterment of the community and the world
   — People focused environment — Salesforce creates an inclusive environment for its employees, customers, and partners. Their vision and strategy are to treat them as a family (they call it Ohana). Their strategy of creating a fun-filled family to make progress for the world and humanity attracts much talent.
   — Trust — Like discussed above, Salesforce has always been very upfront on their architecture, cloud philosophy and uptimes using free articles to ensure they create an environment of 2-way trust with customers and partners alike.
   — Verbosity on social issues — Salesforce has been extremely verbose in their vision around creating a collaborative community. From speaking up against state laws the bill in Indianapolis that makes it legal for individuals to use religious grounds as a defense when a business is sued by people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender to same pay for same jobs regardless of the age, sex or ethnicity or the rising homelessness in San Francisco.