Salesforce No Software, We Mean No 'Legacy' Software

How many times can technology firms mention 'awesome innovation around the customer experience journey' these days? Answer: really, a lot. Salesforce is fond of this kind of terminology and used some it during its modestly named 'World Tour' 2015, which graced London town this week. Benioff deferred to his number #2 Keith Block for this event which featured keynote slickness and superfluous adjectives aplenty, but also a real developer zone. The firm states that it has been 'pioneering a new technology model' (no less) based on shared infrastructure, instant scalability and continuous improvement – it means cloud computing, basically. These functions are now 'core operational requirements' in terms of how firms should view their technology stacks says Salesforce. The company insists that using its model (and, crucially, its Force.com platform) more than 3-million customer applications have been built to solve what are called out as specific business application needs. Do we really need 3-million 'custom' applications on Salesforce? Didn't the first 1 million get it right? Salesforce sees this huge number as a statement to the way applications can be finessed for individual use cases, often not by fully-fledged software application developers, but by what we usually call 'citizen' non-developers i.e. businesspeople. Five levels of trust Salesforce says that operations inside this new (cloud) era of business that we find ourselves in must be based on five levels of trust: