Salesforce1 was the big development revealed at salesforce.com's huge Dreamforce 2013 conference. But many left the conference wondering the same thing: What exactly is Salesforce1? A new mobile app? New sales, service, and marketing applications? A new set of application programming interfaces (APIs)? New development tools? Our analysis gets under the hood of the announcement, finding that Salesforce1 is “all of the above” and a big step forward for the company, cementing its position as a top choice among public cloud development platforms.

Why?

Salesforce1 consolidates and modernizes salesforce.com's mobile client efforts into a single extensible app. There's a gap in offline work still to be fixed.

  1. The Salesforce1 mobile app required a major refactoring and expansion of salesforce.com's APIs. Developers now have a much wider range of functions available to work with salesforce.com's various Web properties. The new APIs are RESTful.
  2. The new APIs opened the door for much better integration between Heroku and salesforce.com's Web properties. Heroku is the company's environment for Ruby, Java, and other developers who don't or won't work in Force.com. Now both development environments are integrated with salesforce.com's applications and underlying application services. 
  3. Salesforce1 is a big set of developments, and addresses one of our biggest criticisms of the company's cloud platforms: that Force.com, Heroku, Chatter, and other services aren't well integrated. Well, now they are.

Forrester clients can access our full analysis here.