Flosum this week launched a partner program that provides systems integrators with free access to a DevOps platform for rapidly building applications that will be deployed on top of software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms from Salesforce.
The goal is to encourage partners to adopt the DevOps platform in the hopes they will expose their end customers to it, says Girish Jashnani, chief architect for Flosum.
The company’s namesake platform was created to provide developers of applications for the Salesforce cloud an alternative to Git repositories that are not optimized for the metadata and XML files that Salesforce applications are built with, adds Jashnani.
“Salesforce also makes use of a more declarative approach to building applications,” says Jashnani.
In theory, the Salesforce approach should make it easier for so-called citizen developers to build applications. In practice, most of the custom applications deployed on the Salesforce platform are built by professional developers, many of whom work for systems integrators.
Interest in building custom Salesforce applications is rising as organizations launch digital business transformation initiatives. Rather than build all those applications from scratch, many organizations are looking to extend customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing applications developed by Salesforce. In some cases, organizations are able to build those applications themselves using low-code application development tools. In most cases, however, customers rely on the expertise of a systems integrator.
In either case, Jashani notes there is a need for a repository to among other things maintain version control of applications as they are developed. It’s not clear to what degree organizations are adopting best DevOps practices to build applications on top of SaaS-based platforms. However, as more organizations reevaluate their application strategies in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic chances are good many of them will soon be looking for a more sophisticated approach to building applications rapidly at scale.
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