Everything in our lives is being impacted by apps. The revolution began in our personal lives – but it’s changed expectations for how we conduct business as well. There’s a new normal, a shift in how we connect with each other, with companies, with our customers and with things.  Salesforce Apps such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud are driving disruptive change in enterprise software by putting customers at the middle.

Introducing Salesforce App Cloud

Underneath these amazing apps is a platform that has enabled our developers to make incredible things. And we’ve opened this technology for every developer to build their own amazing apps:

• Opened Force.com into an “API-First” platform so that you can connect to anything
• Enabled you to go instantly mobile with the Salesforce1 Mobile App
• Expanded the open languages and frameworks you can use on Heroku & added new enterprise-grade collaboration and security features
• Enabled instant data integration across Heroku and Force.com with Heroku Connect
• Added new APIs for Analytics Cloud, Marketing Cloud and more
• Re-invented client-side experiences with Lightning

With the new Salesforce App Cloud, we’ve integrated these innovations into one cloud so you can build exceptionally engaging customer apps and incredibly productive employee apps, all with a single view of your data and on a platform you can trust. With App Cloud you can run your business and launch marketing campaigns, track customer lifecycle, manage cases, build reports and implement business rules using configurable, out of the box services. You can connect these business apps to customer engagement apps built in the language of your choice while delivering incredible user experiences at massive scale.

I talk to developers and startups every day, and there are many incredibly interesting technologies and stacks to play with.  But what is incredibly exciting is the ability to build apps for your customers and users incredibly efficiently, with all the latest frameworks and languages, but back it up with an enterprise platform you can trust to run your business.  Beautiful native and javascript front ends with Heroku DX, trusted enterprise services to manage your customers, and all the Lightning apps your employees need.  App Cloud is a beautiful thing for developers wholly focused on this new world of apps.

Heroku in the Enterprise

Heroku pioneered an easy way to build, deploy and iterate on incredibly high scale consumer applications and is now powering more than 5 million apps and 8 billion requests per day. Enterprises are adopting these web-scale technologies as well — but they’re looking for additional controls.

Heroku Enterprise enables innovative team development, control and trust so that enterprises can deliver cutting-edge
experiences to their customers and employees. Heroku Enterprise also makes integration with Salesforce much stronger. You can instantly sync data with Heroku Connect and use Salesforce Identity to manage users, roles and permissions across both your Heroku and Salesforce orgs. And today, we announce the new Heroku Private Spaces so you can run your own dedicated Heroku instance inside a private IP-restricted network.  This is a revolution in how the best public cloud developer services can be used in a trusted way by enterprises.

Learn Salesforce with 65 Trailhead Badges

The new Salesforce App Cloud is launching with an existing base of over 2.3 million developers and we are just getting started. Learning a new platform takes time, but with Trailhead, our free interactive learning environment, you can quickly try out App Cloud for free and ramp your expertise fast.  I think you’ll be surprised how at how much fun you’ll have racking up points and badges!

We launched Trailhead modestly at Dreamforce ‘14 with only 11 modules – and the response has been unreal. Trailblazers have already earned more than 150,000 badges and the number is climbing fast.

Today we release 18 new badges, to bringing us to 65 badges in 13 trails covering the spectrum of clicks to code. Developers, admins, and end-users can learn to:

• Write effective Apex code
• Automate repetitive business processes with point-and-click tools
• Build apps for the new Lightning Experience
• New: Uncover new business insights using Wave Analytics
• New: Get started as an AppExchange ISV
• New: Manage nonprofit fundraising and more!

Create Amazing Enterprise Apps – Fast

Salesforce App Cloud empowers you, the developer, to build every kind of app for customers, employees, and partners. Across mobile phones, wearables, desktops and connected devices. With App Cloud, you can build apps with drag-and-drop Lightning technology and use Apex to write transactional code. You can build apps in Node.js, Ruby, Java and many other languages. You can create native iOS apps and also HTML5 front-ends. You can integrate with third party systems like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.

With App Cloud, our aspiration is to handle all the underlying layers of infrastructure and platform so that you can focus on what you really want to do — create amazing experiences for your customers.

We can’t wait to see what you build!