This series of articles is a summary of my experience in the development of Salesforce. The purpose of this article is to document my own growth and provide some help to those who are interested in Salesforce. Please forgive me for any omissions

The cloud service

Cloud service, also known as cloud computing service, is a form of obtaining computing resources through the network based on demand. These computing resources are packaged as services and provided to users. The main body that provides these services is called Cloud Service Provider.

For example, if the company now needs to have a customer relationship management system, one way is to hire a group of developers to develop it by themselves, the other way is to directly purchase the cloud service products provided by the cloud service provider. By contrast, the cloud service can solve the company’s needs more quickly, and compared with internal team development, Cloud service providers that have established themselves in specific areas tend to offer more easy-to-use and reliable products. Therefore, the development momentum of cloud services is increasingly rapid, and more and more software began to use cloud services

Cloud services are just a catch-all that can be broken down into three categories:

  • IaaS

    Infrastructure-as-a-service

  • PaaS

    Platform service, platform-as-a-service

  • SaaS

    Software service, software-as-a-service

What’s the difference between the three? Albert Barron, a software architect at IBM, once used the pizza analogy to explain the problem: Imagine you’re a restaurateteur and you want to start a pizza business. You could have made your own pizza from start to finish, but it was a bit of a hassle and a lot of preparation, so you decided to outsource some of the work and use someone else’s services. You have three options:

  1. IaaS

    Someone else provides the kitchen, the stove, the gas, and you use that infrastructure to bake your pizza

  2. PaaS

    In addition to the infrastructure, others provide pizza crust and help you bake your pizza. All you have to do is sprinkle the toppings on the crust and let him bake them for you. In other words, all you have to do is design the taste of the pizza (seafood pizza or chicken pizza), and someone else provides a platform for you to implement your design

  3. SaaS

    Someone else makes the pizza, and you don’t have to intervene, and you get the finished product. All you have to do is sell it, repackage it and put your own Logo on it

To summarize the above example, the corresponding figure for software development is shown below

SaaS is software that is developed, managed and deployed by a third party without technical concerns. The Internet services that ordinary users come into contact with, such as QQ (social service), Baidu netdisk (storage service), Salesforce (customer management service) and so on, are almost all SaaS

PaaS provide a software deployment platform that abstracts hardware and operating system details and can be seamlessly extended. Developers only need to focus on their own business logic, not the underlying layer, such as Heroku, Google App Engine, OpenShift, etc., are PaaS

IaaS is the lowest layer of cloud services and mainly provides basic resources. The difference between PaaS and Amazon EC2 is that users need to control the underlying layer to realize the use logic of infrastructure. For example, Amazon EC2, Ali Cloud and Azure are all Iaas

Salesforce is introduced

Founded in March 1999, Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) software service provider headquartered in San Francisco, USA. It provides customer relationship management platform for on demand applications. The main functions of CRM are: marketing, sales and customer service

  • marketing

    Customer relationship management system in the marketing process, can effectively help marketing personnel to analyze the existing target customer groups, so as to help marketing personnel to carry out accurate market launch. Customer relationship management can also effectively analyze the input-output ratio of each marketing activity, and calculate the effect statements of all marketing activities according to the collection records associated with marketing activities and the reimbursement documents of marketing activities

  • sales

    Sales is the main component of customer relationship management system, mainly including potential customers, customers, contacts, business opportunities, orders, payback, report statistics chart and other modules. Salesman by recording communication content, set up the schedule, the query appointment reminders, a quick look at the customer data, effectively shorten the working time, and big business to remind, sales funnel analysis, performance indicators, statistics, business stage division, and other functions and can help managers to improve the whole company into a single rate, shorten the sales cycle, so as to realize maximum benefits of business growth

  • Customer service

    Customer service is mainly used to quickly and timely obtain customer information and customer history and problem records, so as to solve problems for customers in a targeted and efficient way, improve customer satisfaction and enhance enterprise image. The main functions include customer feedback, solutions, satisfaction survey and other functions

To understand how Salesforce got to where it is today, we need to understand how salespeople worked before it. In the past, sales used to be an entirely human process, with companies storing contacts in a device called rolodex, a physical sequential card, for direct mail advertising or telemarketing

With the spread of computers, companies began storing customer and sales leads electronically, such as Excel. This approach is fine if you have a small number of customers, but when you have more and more customers, spreadsheets are no longer enough and you want more functionality, that’s where CRM comes in

With CRM, we can manage customer data more efficiently, but here comes the problem: every business is different, and different areas have different groups, characteristics, and processes. For these differences, the company can develop its own CRM system, but the results are often unsatisfactory, and the most critical point is not flexible enough. CRM users may want to customize views and controllers, which many in-house custom CRM systems often fail to do. Adding a button to a page that looks simple can be frustrating for programmers. At this point, we wanted to have a CRM system that was not only universal, but also customized to meet different needs. Salesforce was so successful because of this pain point, and flexibility was its killer feature:

  • Salesforce allows you to customize a new table without writing any code, such as creating two new tables for “School” and “faculty” and connecting them to each other, as well as attaching additional information
  • Salesforce allows you to create new views by customizing the layout without writing any code. For example, in a lead screening process, you can create a kanban that only shows abandoned leads and relevant information
  • Salesforce allows you to write arbitrary code that triggers specific APIS for certain actions, such as clicking a button, editing a cell, and so on. This work is primarily done by Salesforce Developer, using the language provided by Salesforce (APEX). Developers just have to take care of the business, and Salesforce takes care of everything else for you, giving you more freedom

Have to say that the concept of Salesforce really refreshing (probably this is the difference between work and industry bosses -_ – | |), the beginning of establishment of Salesforce’s slogan is “NO SOFTWARE”, as a company that want to put an end to the SOFTWARE industry, Salesforce certainly did a lot of work. Six years later, they launched their first app store and created a whole new way to distribute software, even before Apple. In 2005, Salesforce launched AppExchange, an online application marketplace that anyone could use to develop and distribute Salesforce-linked applications to their own Salesforce applications, or to integrate independently of the backend, Implement “plug and play” to enable new and more powerful features.

Today, with Salesforce’s rapid growth and success in changing the way SOFTWARE is built, purchased, and deployed in the enterprise, “NO SOFTWARE” is more than just a slogan. What trends will Salesforce lead in the future? Let’s wait and see