Let me get this out of the way: I love apps.  I love apps that serve big purposes and I love apps that serve extremely small niches.  Apps are what make all the promise of IT come to life.  Apps are why IT matters.

Let me introduce myself.  I’m salesforce.com’s App Evangelist. I’ve been in the IT industry for more than 15 years and have helped customers work with the Force.com platform since 2007.  For the past year I’ve led a 20-person development team on some of the most challenging projects the salesforce.com ecosystem has tackled. 

Over the years, I’ve seen first hand how apps can improve customers’ businesses, quickly and in very interesting ways.  I’ve helped companies launch new apps and even new businesses on the AppExchange. And I’ve also spent a fair amount of time hip deep in code writing apps of my own.

So, yes: I love apps.  And what I love most right now is that the nature of apps is changing.  Cloud computing is helping businesses access and use apps like never before and the response has been tremendous: better apps – more easily acquired, developed, used and shared – make customers dramatically more successful.

Cloud computing and the Force.com platform make all of this a reality in a very new and exciting way.  The Force.com platform has all the key ingredients for developing and deploying apps built right in: point and click development, custom app logic and UI where required, and easy integration to the AppExchange.  Users access these apps over the web via their browser, desktop or – often – mobile and automatically get a robust API.

In other words, Cloud computing and the Force.com platform are changing the balance of power in the IT industry.  The world of big software – companies who dictate requirements to their customers and who produce massive bloatware so big it can only be updated every three years – that world is being replaced by something more secure, more nimble, more interesting and more effective.  

It’s being replaced by apps – secure, reliable, interoperable, flexible, extensible apps.

And I couldn’t be happier. 

I’ll be posting here and on the discussion boards as I explore the world of Force.com apps, commercial, free and open source.  Please join me.  And if you have questions or comments, feel free to post a response or send a note to reid.carlberg [at] salesforce.com.

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