Salesforce executive VP Mike Rosenbaum has told Computing that its new Salesforce1 platform, to be announced at a keynote tomorrow during the company's 2013 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, will "jumpstart innovation" by employing a "mobile first" strategy.
"We are in the midst of a transformation in technology; a combination of cloud computing, ubiquituous connectivity, mobile devices in peoples' hands and connection of every device in the world," Rosenbaum told Computing.
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"Behind every one of those devices is a person - a customer. Someone with an opportunity to connect to and provide better service to."
Possibly because of its Q3 earnings call taking place today - the first day of the Dreamforce conference - Salesforce has taken the unusual decision to officially announce this new "social, mobile and cloud customer platform" after already talking publicly, at length, about its features.
Promising a unified experience across "any form factor", Salesforce says that Salesforce1 will unite all investments its partner companies have made in crafting apps and other engagement experiences across Salesforce's existing platforms and APIs.
Cloud PaaS (platform as a service) Heroku is also coming along for the ride, being succeeded by Heroku1, which will in itself consume mobile database firm Cloudconnect, news of a Salesforce acquisition emerging today.
"We're excited about what we're calling Heroku1, and this connection at a very fundamental level to technologies, and to give developers the ability to build new applications," said Rosenbaum.
"We think it's going to jumpstart innovation, and we're excited about that."
Rosenbaum told Computing that Salesforce1 is "built on the 14-year history of the Salesforce cloud platform, but the R&D platform around the launch has been going for a year.
"We started the year thinking ‘How do we take a mobile-first approach in the development of our applications' and what we realised very quickly was, to do that effectively, we had to take an API-first approach to platform and application development. That worked around increasing the surface area of our APIs and broadening their effectiveness and performance."
As for the Cloudconnect acquisition, Rosenbaum identified such buyouts as still being a core factor in Salesforce's business plan.
"I think we'll continue to look at, and try to innovate on, great technologies, and bring them into the fold. That's part of our approach historically, and it will continue to be part of the approach," said Rosenbaum.
"We provide a technology platform that allows our customers to reinvent how they connect to their customers through those new delivery mechanisms," he continued.
"And that's going to change every product and every industry in the world, and you see it already happening. And that's why we're excited about this platform."