Were you struck by Lightning at Dreamforce ’14? We were.

By marrying its market-leading PaaS and SaaS platforms with modern UI technology, responsive web design, simple-to-use tooling, and seamless access to back office data, Salesforce revealed its play to own the cross-platform business applications development space.

For the past several years, Salesforce has had its eye on helping companies engage with their mobile customers. Advances and growth in the Salesforce1 Platform as well as the introduction of Salesforce’s first-party apps — Salesforce Classic, Salesforce Touch, Chatter Mobile, and the most recent Salesforce1 Mobile App — have all presented leaps forward in delivering the mobile revolution to companies in the Salesforce ecosystem.

According to Bluewolf’s 2015 State of Salesforce Annual Review, Salesforce1 mobile adoption is exploding. In a little over a year after its introduction, 89% of Salesforce customers are using the Salesforce1 mobile application, while 46% have built or plan to build a custom mobile app on the Salesforce1 Platform in 2015. Additionally, those already using the Salesforce1 Mobile app are twice as likely to build custom mobile apps.

Among the most difficult aspects of "going mobile" is designing your application for multiple devices and interfaces. Salesforce aims to simplify and standardize this issue by providing its own set of components for developers when developing apps built on the Salesforce platform. This provides a consistent experience for end users, as well as a consistent appearance to commonly used components in desktop and mobile applications. Additionally, this aids in the overall adoption of the platform, as it provides users a more intuitive and standardized approach to interacting with their Salesforce instance.

Let's examine these new tools and their impact:

Lightning AppBuilder is a new unified development tool that allows a developer to simultaneously develop for all form factors — with push-button deployment. This feature allows a developer to create a single application that can be deployed to any device — customized to the specific use case and form factor. According to a recent study commissioned by Facebook, more than 60% of online adults use at least two devices every day, while a quarter of online Americans use three devices. These trends makes the Lightning AppBuilder particularly advantageous, as multi-device and multi-browser use become the new standard.

Lightning Components are pre-built functionalities that can be integrated into Salesforce applications using a simple drag-and-drop model. Through the reusable components model, Lighting will enable very rapid iteration of new application features to meet changing customer demands and experience expectations. Additionally, customers can build their own components, buy them on the AppExchange like traditional ISV applications, or work with consulting partners like Bluewolf to have them built.

Lightning Connect combines the External Data Services and External Objects features of the Platform, using a new standard called “OData” to dynamically query or retrieve information from back office or legacy apps and databases, and then present it in the context of a Salesforce standard or custom object.

Lightning Process Builder constructs business process flows that lead users through the required steps to execute a business process or transaction. Everything from simple to highly complex processes can be modeled and enforced in the application.

Lightning Community Designer is a rebranding of the Communities Designer tool, used to rapidly create branded public or private Communities. At this point, it’s unclear as to whether the same components available in the AppBuilder will be available here.

So what does this mean mean for your business? 

Lightning will enrich customer, employee, and partner interactions by providing a simple, consumer-like interface that delivers fresh, up-to-the-moment data in context. Previously, a lot of build-time would go into designing mobile or desktop friendly interfaces that feed from Salesforce data. With Salesforce Lightning, the design-build-deploy cycle for the majority of business processes and functions has been cut down, thereby allowing developers to release apps and get feedback from end users much more quickly. As today’s businesses pivot and change rapidly, this toolset allows a much better bedrock for “pilot” development and proof of concepts, before having to look into developing bespoke applications.

While the release of Salesforce Lighting has made it easier to deploy Salesforce customizations across devices, there are still the same limitations that come with all web-based mobile apps. Mainly, the lack of ability to utilize native hardware functionality, speed, and secure offline access. 

For Bluewolf, Lightning expands our ability, and is another way to enable our customers to optimize their customer moments — all the touchpoints with customers, be it in person, over the phone, or unmediated customer self-service.

Lightning isn’t replacing current Salesforce business logic and UI tools — yet. However, we predict that it will become a preferred interface very quickly and, as its capabilities grow, will erode the base of apps on the old UI.  Most of the Lightning family of products is scheduled to be delivered in the Salesforce Spring ’15 release (Safe Harbor applies).

Learn more about accelerating mobile innovation in your organization. Download our State of Salesforce Annual Review, or benchmark yourself against more than one thousand Salesforce customers.