Forrester Names Salesforce a Leader Among Low-Code App Development Platforms

This year Forrester recognized Salesforce as a leader in low-code application development in its recent report “The Forrester Wave™: Low-Code Development Platforms for Application Development & Deployment Professionals, Q1 2019.” On the Salesforce Platform team, we believe it’s for good reason — we’ve been a pioneer in low-code application development since the company’s founding in 1999.

Forrester found that the vendors evaluated in this report offer a comprehensive declarative development approach, one that allows professionals to define data, logic, flows, forms, and other application artifacts without writing code. Vendors also support many business use cases.

Forrester specifically called out Salesforce’s strong features for data and content management, identity and access management, platform administration, and event-based apps, anchoring the product’s value as a development platform. Salesforce’s robust partner roster and long list of security certifications were also highlighted as strengths.

Forrester spotlighted the growing adoption of low-code development platforms, with 23% of respondents in a global developer survey reporting current usage of low-code platforms in 2018, and an additional 22% planning to use them in 2019. One of the key motivations for this adoption is the ever-growing demands of the digital business on software development.

Salesforce is leading the industry with innovation in low-code development platforms

Over the last year, Salesforce has delivered a number of innovations that have strengthened the value of the Salesforce Lightning Platform, our low-code development platform, to our customers. We have delivered across three core values:

Drive innovation in low-code builders and citizen development

Empowering everyone to build applications, Salesforce has delivered key enhancements including:

Lightning Flow Builder – To leverage the full power of Lightning Components and our all-new Lightning Flow process automation engine, we delivered an entirely new low-code tool for process and flow-based development, built from the ground up for speed, ease of use, and breadth of capabilities.
Mobile Publisher – To deliver a complete end-to-end low-code development experience across every device, we launched Mobile Publisher, a fully managed process for automatically converting customer- and partner-facing portals into mobile apps that we publish to the Apple and Google app stores on behalf of our customers.

Delight developers with modern app dev tools and processes

Extending the capabilities of the Lightning Platform across industries, segments, and use cases, Salesforce has invested heavily in the professional developer capabilities needed to enhance and extend the power of the Lightning Platform:

Lightning Web Components and Salesforce DX – To supercharge the Salesforce developer ecosystem and empower every JavaScript developer to build on the Lightning Platform, Salesforce recently launched Lightning Web Components. This new web standards-based framework for front-end application development on Salesforce takes advantage of the many innovations in Salesforce DX, or developer experience, we have delivered over the last two years.
Heroku Enhancements – To extend the Lightning Platform on public cloud with support for cloud native application development with open standard languages, Salesforce has continued to enhance the low-code integration between Lightning Platform and Heroku, including one-click secure data synchronization for regulated apps with Heroku Shield Connect and a broad set of additional compliance certifications to align trust between the two platforms.

Enhance enterprise services to drive productivity and transform app experiences

Accelerating time to value, Salesforce offers a broad and deep set of enterprise services out of the box that allow customers to deliver innovative apps faster with new capabilities:

Event-Driven Architecture and MuleSoft – To unlock all of your data and extend workflows across applications, Salesforce has embraced a new event-driven architecture at the heart of the Lightning Platform, based on Platform Events. We recently expanded our event scale with High Volume Platform Events and added Change Data Capture Events to stream data changes from Salesforce applications. Most significantly, we added MuleSoft to the Salesforce portfolio last year to empower customers to connect every app, every device, and every experience. MuleSoft natively supports Platform Events, empowering developers to integrate Salesforce events across applications without custom code.
Einstein Platform – To bring insight, predictive intelligence, and machine learning to every application, Salesforce delivered several new Einstein Platform capabilities.Einstein Prediction Builder, provides a low-code way to use your historical data to make custom predictions in your app without needing code or data scientists, and Einstein Next Best Action, is a powerful decisioning tool that delivers insights at the point of maximum impact, during a customer engagement.

Get the full story on why Forrester named Salesforce a leader. Read the report HERE.