Built to Pivot: Parker Harris on the Future of the Salesforce Platform

Michael Rivo: Welcome back to Blazing Trails. I'm your host, Michael Rivo, from Salesforce studios. Today I'm joined by Parker Harris. Parker co- founded Salesforce in the spring of 1999. Today, he drives technology, vision, and architecture across Salesforce. He's a member of Salesforce's board of directors. Welcome to the show Parker.

Parker Harris: Thank you for having me.

Michael Rivo: Well, we're excited that you're here. The first question is after 22 years at Salesforce, there's been so much change, change across the industry. What have you seen of these changes, that's had the most impact, in driving the industry forward?

Parker Harris: Well, a lot has changed, if you think about it, we didn't have the iPhone. We didn't have Facebook. We didn't have Twitter. So, none of the social media platforms. We didn't have the hyperscalers, Amazon, AWS, GCP, Azure. So, you name it, pretty much everything has changed. We started the company in'99, and all of that has happened, in the past 22 years.

Michael Rivo: Mm- hmm( affirmative) You know the cloud has really kind of gone mainstream. When Salesforce started, it was such a new idea to bring CRM to the cloud. How have you seen that mainstreaming process? What does that look like as the cloud has sort of taken over the industry?

Parker Harris: Well, when we started the company, people were reticent sometimes, to put their credit cards on the internet. I know that's hard for some listeners to imagine. Much less their customer lists. Many customers would say, or potential customers would say," There's no way I'll ever use you because I would never put my customer list on the internet. It's far too risky. It's far too dangerous." They felt safer having workloads in their own data centers. I think what's changed, is they've found that things are actually safer in these cloud providers. Whose job it is, day in and day out, to protect customer information, so that has changed dramatically. Then, if you look at what's happened in this past year, with everyone shuttered at home, everything has gone digital. We are doing this podcast digitally online. We're not physically together. We are selling virtually. We are doing customer service virtually. Dell over in a week sent all of their agents home. Because they're using our platform, they were able to continue providing customer service, to their customers. E- commerce is on fire. Everything is going faster and going even more in digital, right now.

Michael Rivo: You made a huge bet on building a platform, in the early days, and not just apps. Tell us about that decision? How you guys came to that?

Parker Harris: Oh, it was not really necessarily a decision, it was something that we had to do. When we started the company, we knew that we wanted to provide a service, to as many customers as possible all over the world. It was hard to imagine where we are today, but we imagined a lot of customers, a lot of regions, a lot of different size customers. We're like," How in the world are we going to do that? How are we going to serve all of these customers?" We knew that we couldn't do it by letting customers change the software themselves. Each have their own version of the software, that a consultant would take our software, and add additional software to it. We needed to basically invent a metadata driven platform, that allows us to have one set of software, that could serve a small high- tech company here in the Bay Area. We had early customers in Australia, in England, and they were not an high- Tech. Yet, our service could work for them. Then, we had a customer come to us, that was in the healthcare business. They said," Hey, we're patient care, we don't have accounts, we have hospitals. We don't have contacts, we have patients, and we want to rename those tabs." We were like," Well, just pretend that account is a hospital." Mark said," No. No, we'll support that." So, we allowed you to change the names of tabs. We allow you to create your own tables or custom objects. We added workflow... We added all this stuff over the years and it's really in response to our customers. That's what our customers asked us to do. It's what allowed us to deliver a service with trust, customer success, innovation, for the past 22 years. Equality for that matter. Don't forget about equality, but you think about a platform that also is accessible. That is available in any language. That everyone can get into, use it, and get value from it.

Michael Rivo: It empowered so much speed and flexibility, which has been so important recently. When you think about work. com, Vaccine Cloud, across so many industries, building so much customization. How do you look at that, in terms of how the platform has been able to support that, over the years?

Parker Harris: Well, you just mentioned work. com. work. com was not even an idea when the pandemic started. Then, we were like," Whoa, everyone's at home. How are we going to, first of all, support people at home? How can our platform do that? How can we help people do contact tracing? How can we help them, eventually get back into the office, as things start to reopen?" We said," Hey, we're going to go build a new product." In the middle of the pandemic, we took some teams and said," All right, we need a brand- new product and we need it now." That would have been impossible, without the power of our platform, because they didn't have to go write code from scratch. They just took our platform and pivoted quickly. Came out with a new offering, called work. com, that does all of those things. Capabilities of that, that we call a Vaccine Cloud, are allowing a lot of people in the United States, Ireland, Australia, all over the world, many places are using our technology. Where citizens are going to websites and saying," Hey, I'd like to get vaccinated. When can I get my vaccine?" You can imagine the anxiety, the number of users hitting these websites. Then, you get into the vaccination site, people with iPads, they're saying," Hi, welcome Parker. You have an appointment today?"" Yes, I do." They look it up on the iPad and then you get your vaccine. That's all recorded. That's all through Salesforce. That's amazing. That did not exist a year and a half ago or even a year ago frankly. We created it. We rolled it out. We drove change. Frankly, it's a fantastic cause, helping the world kind of start to exit the lockdown, that this pandemic has created.

Michael Rivo: Yeah. It's an incredible story. It's a good segue into low- code, which I wanted to talk about, with TDX coming up. How low- code has really reached a tipping point across the industry.

Parker Harris: Well, you know what's interesting, is we started out with only low- code. Over time, we added the support for code. We added a stored procedure language, called Apex, that you can do in transaction code on our platform. We added Workflow. We added Visualforce, to write code, to do user experience. That then evolved into lightning, and lightning web components today, which is state- of- the- art. What I think is missing in that, that we have to really hit home, is just because it's possible to write code doesn't mean you should write code. I always celebrate the moment, when we remove code from our code base, or when a customer removes code from their implementation. So, we're on a mission now, with all of our customers, that say low- code is the future. You may have a large developer community that is desirous to write a lot of code. I don't care what platform or what technology you're talking about, code has inertia, it has gravity, and it has a cost. The less you can put into your product, and put into your implementations, the better. That was the power of getting work. com and Vaccine Cloud off the grounds. We are the premier platform for low- code development. That's why I'm so excited at TDX, to show off some of the new capabilities that we have.

Michael Rivo: I'm curious, are you seeing a change in how that's being received across IT departments and developers, who as you say, want to be creative and write code? Is there a perception change, of how you can use these tools to accelerate, and then build smaller pieces on top... You know, being able to integrate that into your workflow?

Parker Harris: Yeah, it just takes a few Trailblazer examples. Where you've got someone that says," I know what I'm going to do here. I'm going to do it fast. I know you guys are talking over there, and we're writing on the whiteboard, these grand visions. While you're doing that, I'm going to go actually solve some business problems." Then, they go do it quickly. So, it's those stories of Trailblazer success, where somebody does something quickly, solves a business problem. It looks like magic. It kind of is magic, because of a low- code platform, like Salesforce is. Then, building on that, tactics dictate strategy, even, in Trailblazers on the road doing implementations. So, it's building on that success and getting that momentum. Just having an agile IT environment, where all you're doing is constantly evolving, and going fast. You can't do that without low- code.

Michael Rivo: Yeah. There's nothing like seeing something happen to get people's attention. Okay, so TDX is coming up, what are some of the major themes? What are we going to hear about this year?

Parker Harris: Well, the themes, I've been going through the Keynote, and I can't wait to deliver it to everyone. We want people to innovate anywhere, not just in the office. Because of our platform, because of our low- code platform, you can innovate anywhere because of things like Flow, visual Workflow, OmniScript, and all of the amazing automation capabilities we have. You can automate anything. Anything you want. You can do that with low- code. You can do it quickly. When you automate something, you give the people that were involved in those manual tasks, the ability to up level what they're doing. To have more impact in their corporations. TDX and Trailhead, it's about empowering everyone. How do we make sure everyone is empowered? Not just the people who have the skills already for writing a lot of code. How do you empower everyone to become a Trailblazer? How do you do it quickly and become a Trailblazer as a low- code Trailblazer? So, yeah, the themes are innovate anywhere, automate anything, scale everything, and empower everyone. We're going to hit those themes in the keynote and beyond. We're going to have some great customer stories to highlight them. It's going to be incredible. They're going to be some Trailblazers in person, actually. That's going to be a little surprise. Not a lot because of COVID. We are very careful about our employees, our customers, and that our Trailblazers health. We feel like even for TrailheDX, we got to open up a little bit.

Michael Rivo: Little by little, we'll start seeing each other in person again soon. I wanted to ask you too Sir, what you're most excited, industry- wide right now? You've been at it a long time. You're still passionate. You're building product. You're deep in it. What's exciting to you in the industry right now?

Parker Harris: Have you heard of a company called Slack?

Michael Rivo: I have heard of them a little bit.

Parker Harris: Well, when we close that transaction and the Slack transaction is not closed yet. When we do close it, I would say that the potential I see for the future of conversational interfaces, is changing the way people work. The evolution of the workplace, and beyond the workplace with those interfaces, I think is one of the most exciting trends in technology right now. I think it's going to have a huge impact on Trailblazers, because they're going to get lit up by this and realize," Wow, there's so much more productivity I can create for employees, that they can live in these experiences, and still get their work done." Many of them may not ever" Log into Salesforce." Even though they are. Even though they're using bits of it. They're going to be doing their jobs and the flow of their work. When that flow is rocking, their productivity is really going to soar.

Michael Rivo: This idea of conversational interfaces, just tell me a little bit more about what that means?

Parker Harris: Okay. Imagine that Dell corporation send all of their customer service agents home and they do something really cool. So, when all of their agents are at home or all of Dell's agents are at home, and we're all working, and somebody calls in and needs support. That support agent needs other people in the support organization, to quickly rally around and help them, to solve that customer's problem. You can imagine if we're not in the same office, you can't put someone on hold and say," Hey, I need some help over here. I've got this problem." You can do it through a tool like Slack and it's called case swarming. They all have context. They've got the case information's right there. They can open up the case. All the information's there. They can go back and forth in real time, and collaborate, to quickly solve the customer's problem. That's one- use case. There are so many that we have seen and thought about. I really think, especially as the world has gone more and more digital, something like a Slack from a conversational interface or a chat interface, but doing work where you're communicating. Do work in the flow of conversation, that will make everyone more productive.

Michael Rivo: Yeah. I think one of the interesting things to figure out is how to set up those interactions and conversations in the right way, where it is in the flow.

Parker Harris: At TDX, you're going to learn how to automate anything. Imagine marrying the beauty of automation and workflow that pulls you through a process, but humans get involved in workflow. Computers can't do everything, thank God, or we wouldn't have jobs. When you get inserted into that workflow as a human, what if you got inserted through these interfaces, instead of logging into different systems to do your work. Log in to Salesforce, log in into Workday, going to a spreadsheet, jumping around. What if all of that could happen in a more fluid way?

Michael Rivo: Super exciting.

Parker Harris: Yeah, really exciting.

Michael Rivo: Okay. So, Parker, following up on what you're excited about, where do you see things going? What's next for the platform over the next two to five years?

Parker Harris: One is, we're baking more and more of security, compliance, and trust, into the platform. A lot of that is through a Hyperforce, which is our move to the public cloud. That lets us solve, for example, data residency concerns, where you say," I want my data in France."" Well, that's fine. We'll run your workload in France"" I want it in Brazil." Run it in Brazil." So, we are able to actually take our system and run it pretty much anywhere in the world. Also, scale that we can scale elastically. That we can give you as much scale as you need. The vaccine sites were a great example of that. Everyone, is a B to C company, in this new digital world, that we're in. Everyone, is hitting B to C scale challenges. Our platform is supporting that data. When I think of customer data, we host and protect more customer data, than any company in the world. It's our customer's data. We want to keep giving more value back to those customers. So, when you see what we have with our customer data platform, that allows you to bring all of our data that we host for you together, also, other data assets. You might have an incorporation. Bring those together on a horizontally scalable, but secure and trusted platform. That you can then use to activate, to go send your emails, send SMSs, that you have a 360- degree view of every one of those consumers. It's a 360- degree view that's not as of a month ago. It's as of five seconds ago, when that consumer hits your website, opened your mobile app, or entered your physical store. Those are the little digital signals, that assuming that consumer is giving you the right to use that information, because privacy is also baked into this platform. Assuming they want to give you that information, to help you give them a better customer experience. Whether you're buying something, you need customer service, or you're receiving a marketing email about things you might be interested in. All of it, will be highly personalized, and highly personalized in a real time. Everyone's trying to figure out how to get data together and analyze it. The problem is not to bring it together and analyze it, it's to activate it, to do something with it. I couldn't be more excited about that direction. It's really all about the customer 360. All of those touch points, doing it at hyperscale, and in real time.

Michael Rivo: Great. A heartfelt thank you, Parker, for joining us today. Really appreciate it.

Parker Harris: Great being here. I loved the conversation. I hope all of you, join me and all of my friends, at TDX this week.

Michael Rivo: That was Parker Harris, CTO and...