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Today’s marketplace is fierce, and competitors are innovating faster than ever before. The cost of innovation from a technological perspective has dropped dramatically over the past few years.

Platforms like Salesforce1 are enabling companies to create applications for customers, employees, and business partners that deliver tangible value, extend the relationship beyond traditional boundaries, and cultivate enthusiastic brand loyalty.

There are very few industries where building an application today doesn’t make sense, and wouldn’t create real value, particularly as the cost of doing so is now in the reach of even small enterprises. So let’s assume that you already want to build apps to create more value for your customers, employees, business partners, or all of them. Why use Salesforce1? Cost efficiency, rapid development, and a wide array of application integration possibilities, combined with the ability to quickly put app usage and interaction data to work for you are just a few reasons.

Whether you are a startup like Trunk Club and need to create a richer shopping experience, or a global automotive powerhouse like Ford and want to extend the power of social media to build momentum for your line of vehicles, Salesforce1 has the rich suite of tools to quickly build competitive capacity with engaging apps.

From a technology perspective, there are a plethora of reasons to consider adopting it in order to create one or applications. First, Salesforce1 offers an application model in which all users and apps share a single, common infrastructure and code base, which greatly reduces the time and costs associated with developing, testing, and deploying relatively complex applications. Because it is a cloud-based platform, you don’t need to add overhead to your existing infrastructure.

Second, Salesforce1 offers a metadata-driven development model, which enables an app development approach under which apps are defined as declarative “blueprints,” with no code required. Data models, objects, forms, workflows, and more are defined by metadata. Why is this important? It reduces the complexity of developing, maintaining, and extending applications – it doesn’t matter if your team is familiar with any specific object oriented programming language, and that reduces complexity and drives costs down dramatically.

Third, apps are only as good as their integrations. If you develop an application and cannot get access to consumption or interaction data, it’s worthless. At the end of the day you want to be able to use the data generated by your apps to make smarter business decisions; however, managing one or a handful of complex integrations could be challenging. Fear not, Salesforce1 offers several APIs that provide direct access to all data stored in Force.com from virtually any programming language and platform.

Fourth, you can use Apex, the world’s first on-demand programming language, which runs in the cloud on the Force.com platform servers. Apex Code is designed explicitly for expressing business logic and manipulating data, rather than generically supporting other programming tasks such as user interfaces and interaction. Why does this matter? You guessed it, simplicity and speed of development! Are you starting to see a theme here?

Moving beyond the technical reasons to consider Salesforce1, you need to consider market momentum and critical mass when you’re selecting a platform on which to build your apps. Salesforce has proven its ability to innovate, acquire and integrate new technologies that drive value for its customers and partners. If you really want to dive deep and understand the value of Salesforce1, I would urge you to get to the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco in a few weeks and see what companies are doing with the Salesforce1 platform.

About Mikah Sellers

Mikah serves as an industry advisor to First Line Software. His other roles include SVP at Grafik, DC’s go-to branding agency, and CMO & CTO for Carsquare, one of DC’s hottest tech startups. In adiditon, Mikah serves as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University where he teaches a variety of courses in marketing and technology, and an outside advisor to several DC area startups.

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