Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

When Salesforce launched Force.com in 2007 as a place for developers to build applications on top of Salesforce, it was a pivotal moment for the concept of SaaS platforms. Since then, it’s been said that every enterprise SaaS company wants to be a platform play. Today, New Relic achieved that goal when it announced the New Relic One Observability Platform at the company’s FutureStack conference in New York City.

Company co-founder and CEO Lew Cirne explained that in order to be a platform, by definition, it is something that other people can build software on. “What we are shipping is a set of capabilities to enable our customers and partners to build their own observability applications on the very same platform that we’ve built our product,” Cirne told TechCrunch.

He sees these third-party developers building applications to enable additional innovations on top of the New Relic platform that perhaps New Relic’s engineers couldn’t because of time and resource constraints. “There are so many use cases for this data, far more than the engineers that we have at our company could ever do, but a community of people who can do this together can totally unlock the power of this data,” Cirne said.

Like many platform companies, New Relic found that as it expanded its own offering, it required a platform for its developers to access a common set of services to build these additional offerings, and as they built out this platform, it made it possible to open it up to external developers to access the same set of services as the New Relic engineering team.

“What we have is metrics, logs, events and traces coming from our customers’ digital software. So they have access to all that data in real time to build applications, measure the health of their digital business and build applications on top of that. Just as Force.com was the thing that really transformed Salesforce as a company into being a strategic vendor, we think the same thing will happen for us with what we’re offering,” he said.

As a proof point for the platform, the company is releasing a dozen open-source tools built on top of the New Relic platform today in conjunction with the announcement. One example is an application to help identify where companies could be over-spending on their AWS bills. “We’re actually finding 30-40% savings opportunities for them where they’re provisioning larger servers than they need for the workload. Based on the data that we’re analyzing, we’re recommending what the right size deployment should be,” Cirne said.

The New Relic One Observability Platform and the 12 free apps will be available starting today.

Apple and Salesforce are both highly successful, iconic brands, who like to put on a big show when they make product announcements. Today, the two companies announced they were forming a strategic partnership with an emphasis on mobile strategy ahead of Salesforce’s enormous customer conference, Dreamforce, which starts tomorrow in San Francisco.

For Apple, which is has been establishing partnerships with key enterprise brands for the last several years, today’s news is a another big step toward solidifying its enterprise strategy by involving the largest enterprise SaaS vendor in the world.

“We’re forming a strategic partnership with Salesforce to change the way people work and to empower developers of all abilities to build world-class mobile apps,” Susan Prescott, vice president of markets, apps and services at Apple told TechCrunch.

Tim Cook at Apple event on September 12, 2018 Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, who came over in the Quip deal a couple of years ago, says working together, the two companies can streamline mobile development for customers. “Every single one of our customers is on mobile. They all want world-class mobile experiences, and this enables us when we’re talking to a customer about their mobile strategy, that we can be in that conversation together,” he explained.

For starters, the partnership is going to involve three main components: The two companies are going to work together to bring in some key iOS features such Siri Shortcuts and integration with Apple’s Business Chat into the Salesforce mobile app. Much like the partnership between Apple and IBM, Apple and Salesforce will also work together to build industry-specific iOS apps on the Salesforce platform.

The companies are also working together on a new mobile SDK built specifically for Swift, Apple’s popular programming language. The plan is to provide a way to build Swift apps for iOS and deploy them natively on Salesforce’s Lightning platform.

The final component involves deeper integration with Trailhead, Salesforce’s education platform. That will involve a new Trailhead Mobile app on IOS as well as adding Swift education courses to the Trailhead catalogue to help drive adoption of the mobile SDK.

While Apple has largely been perceived as a consumer-focused organization, as we saw a shift to  companies encouraging employees to bring their own devices to work over the last six or seven years, Apple has benefited. As that has happened, it has been able to take advantage to sell more products and services and has partnered with a number of other well-known enterprise brands including IBM, Cisco, SAP and GE along with systems integrators Accenture and Deloitte.

The move gives Salesforce a formidable partner to continue their incredible growth trajectory. Just last year the company passed the $10 billion run rate putting it in rarefied company with some of the most successful software companies in the world. In their most recent earnings call at the end of August, they reported $3.28 billion for the quarter, placing them on a run rate of over $13 billion. Connecting with Apple could help keep that momentum growing.

The two companies will show off the partnership at Dreamforce this week. It’s a deal that has the potential to work out well for both companies, giving Salesforce a more integrated iOS experience and helping Apple increase its reach into the enterprise.

 This afternoon at a big presentation in San Francisco, Salesforce announced a new version of the Lightning CRM platform that includes built-in Wave analytics, intelligent email from its RelateIQ purchase in July, 2014 and configure-price-quote features from its SteelBrick acquisition at the end of last year. In addition, the company announced a new built-in phone tool which allows sales people… Read More