For those who haven't heard, I've recently joined Salesforce.com working on the Platform business. It's great to be in a new place, on a growing team, working on a growth market (According to Gartner, anyway).
In my few few weeks, I've talked to about a dozen customers who all spin a similar story:
- Our business systems can't keep up with our user demand (consumerization of IT trends are rampant)
- Moving fast is important, but it can't pose undue security risk. With a nod to Citibank as an example...
With an array of new technologies available to IT professionals, productivity gains are only going to increase in the coming years. Ruby was a catalyst, new languages continue to pop up, and even Java is keeping pace with new frameworks to accelerate deployment in the Enterprise. Programmers are turning into polygot programmers, which is an accurate (if not amusing) term I've learned.
Putting this new power on a secure platform gives the CIO the ability to grow the business with increased productivity, while maintaining a central governance point to enforce enterprise security.
Sounds like the best of both worlds to me...
