Salesforce Platform: IT Visionaries | Salesforce

I truly believe that speed is new currency for business. You gotta move fast. And those that are taking too long to think through it or consider things, they will find themselves left behind sooner than they had expected. The old way of doing business, the old way of building IT systems, it's broke. You absolutely have to keep up. You can't get stuck in a rut. You have to evolve. You have to change with your customers, change with the technology and stay ahead of it. I can't bury my head in the back office, but we have to look to the future in different ways. It brings us into the world of being business people, not technologists. Just being able to put so much on one platform and have the ability to innovate in different ways on a platform is really very exciting. 100% of the infrastructure is taken care of, fault tolerant, redundant, connected. IT had the point and click declarative language, very quick to develop. IT had inbuilt work workflow already there. You just needed to configure it. Everything you need is right there in one system. The whole cloud is mobile enabled. It's not like you go to a different infrastructure or you go to a different tool set. We don't have to spend our time investing in the architecture. We're able to do a lot more with the limited resources that everyone is dealing with. IT saved us six figures somewhere at least, and probably knocked six to nine months off of the project. We went from a IT shop that was very much a secondary thought to an IT shop that was sort of leading the business and showing them the way. It's really changing it from IT information technology to innovation technology. The playground has dramatically expanded, but the impact you potentially have as CIO on the business is so much bigger than it was before. Sam.