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This question comes up quite often in my discussions with small to medium businesses: Does Big Data matter to you? 

Big Data has been perceived as a large enterprise focus area while small organizations think that they can sit on the sidelines and wait. You hear of companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and IBM focusing a lot of resources toward capturing and utilizing Big Data. If you're sitting out until you think it's relevant for small business, then you need to get started today because it's relevant now.

In this customer-centric age, the only thing worse (actually exponentially worse) than having no dedicated system for your customers, better known as Customer Relationship Management systems or CRM systems, is to have a CRM that doesn't work the way you intended it to! You may have made massive investments, including money and time. You may have implemented the best CRM for your organization and, yet, slowly but surely you can see it's failing to live up to your expectations. Sounds like a complete nightmare, doesn't it?

One of the most time-consuming aspects of any CRM implementation for any enterprise is the selection of the CRM system itself. In my experience, I have seen stakeholders spend considerable time (months to years) analyzing one option after another, sifting through the subscription plans on offer. In fact, if you are a rookie, the sheer plethora of options available to you will whirl your mind.

Engaging a managed technology service provider has often been viewed as something for large organizations who have a lot of cash to spare. However, technology outsourcing is slowly finding its following amongst organizations of all sizes and industry, courtesy ever-changing business dynamics and innovation. I am often asked, why and when to outsource in-house Salesforce services to a managed service provider. The answer, though involves explanation, is simpler than what you may have initially thought.

Well, not quite literally!  Salesforce 1 Lightning is a new-age Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering from Salesforce. Billed as the fastest, quickest way of dishing out cross-device, responsive applications on the Force.com platform, Lightning is a collection of new and re-branded technologies that simplify and deliver the whole lifecycle of building apps, integrating data and automating business processes, at the speed of light!

Salesforce introduced its new component framework Lightning in its winter’15 release, targeted at building apps, integrating data and automating business processes at a very fast speed. In this blog post, I am going to talk about the Lightning Process Builder, Salesforce’s workflow and process automation framework.

Maintaining your Salesforce org is quite a Herculean task. Not only do you have to ensure the access to correct relevant data to all your users, you are also responsible for maintaining the integrity of your org data to avoid any delay on projects due to configuration rework and thereby managing the overall costs. In this blog post, I will talk about 9 best practices that ease your job as a Salesforce administrator.

As a SFDC developer, you are expected to create magic with every line of code that you write! Your code is expected to be clean, optimized, and all of this within the time-frame set by your Project Manager and/or client! Easier said than done! Getting a perfect code in place, which adheres to all the best practices laid down by Salesforce is much like an art that is perfected with a lot of practice over time. Notwithstanding that fact, here are 10 quick-fixes to get you started on the right course, which help you stay within the governor limits and enable you to better the performance of your code without much ado.

So, roughly a year after Mark Benioff declared at Dreamforce’13 that SFDC “does not intend to move into the traditional, horizontal analytics market”, Salesforce recently launched its cloud-based analytics platform ‘Wave’ at Dreamforce’14 and entered the $38 billion analytics market with a bang! To be fair to Benioff, Wave is anything but traditional. Touted as the “analytics for the rest of us”, Wave is designed first and foremost for mobile interaction and usage, so that your sales reps and mobile workforce can explore the data within Salesforce and other third-party applications from diverse vendors like Microsoft and SAP on-the-go, slice and dice it, and get insights anywhere, anytime, and in any way required.