Mike Boyle:

The next tech trend on our list is one’s called no-code/low-code, and in particular with low-code, Gartner predicts that 65% of application development activity will be low-code by 2024. Ben, how are you feeling about no-code/low-code?

Ben McCarthy:

Yeah, I think it’s a really exciting time for low-code/no-code. Most people in the Salesforce ecosystem will be aware that Salesforce are phasing out their workflow rules and process build or automation tools in favor of flow, so retiring those. And I mean, for the past two, three years, Salesforce has only been updating the flow tool. And a lot of people… Flow is the most powerful automation tool, declarative low-code tool that you have on Salesforce. I think there’s an argument that could say apex and coding languages in the future could become, I don’t want to say obsolete because I don’t think that’s true, but as Gartner predicts, I think a huge amount of development could be done using declarative, no-code/low-code tools, which would massively speed up development times and reduce the need for very expensive developers. I do think that’s quite exciting.

Something that we’ve we’ve played around with quite a bit this year is a tool called MuleSoft Composer, which some people might be aware about, which is a product built by MuleSoft, which is owned by Salesforce. But it’s the first tool they’ve released which is a low-code/no-code integration product. So we’ve played around with it, we’ve seen quite a few demos, and it really is as easy as going… They have a bunch of prebuilt connectors. You say what you want to integrate with, you say what parameters you want the integration to fire, what you want it to bring back. You can do loops through it. You can do and/if statements. So it’s very, very powerful. I think the only limitation with it at the moment is that you can only use the prebuilt connectors that Salesforce have rolled out.

But they’ve got about 20 now, including NetSuite, JIRA, Salesforce to Salesforce, so some really big names in there. I think it’s really exciting, and I think it is a topic on mind is how much will we rely on developers in the future? And I mean, people have been saying that for years when it comes to Salesforce. You brought out lightning, which allowed you to customize the UI a lot more than you could in Salesforce Classic, but you still need developers to build those really custom UIs. Maybe the trend of you will always need a developer will continue and maybe low-code/no-code will just replace some of the declarative tools that we’ve got now. But yeah, I think it’s interesting to see how it developed.

Mike Boyle:

And Brian, what are your thoughts on low-code/no-code?

Brian Mize:

I completely agree, again, with what Ben said. I think as we look at enterprise solutions, low-code/no-code, especially in the Salesforce ecosystem, can get you most of the way there, but the need to have a developer to do some of the really custom stuff as it grows, certainly at least for the foreseeable future, that will be a need. Low-code/no-code, Salesforce has done a great job, whether we’re talking about validation rules or app builders, on taking what at one time, if you go back maybe five or eight years and go into an enterprise, people there would have had to submit requests to their IT department. “I need you to build this report. I need you to create this. I need you update this.” And you’ve found, really, a growth of IT shops, if you will, secret subversive IT shops, maybe, sitting in corners of all different areas of business who were doing those little things.

They weren’t developers. They didn’t have that the experience that the IT department had, but they had enough to move the business that much further down the line. And that’s where no-code/low-code is benefiting businesses today are those people who would sit in the corners and do those things. Now they’re brought to the table. They can do the things. They can move the needle. They can take the business from point A to point B in a much faster way, and they have the business knowledge, so they know what the outcome needs to be. We’re going to see that continue to grow, continue to expand, as we move ahead.

In fact, if we go back just a couple of topics, even AI is getting involved in that, and AI will be able to spin some of these things up as we move ahead as well, so you’ll be able to control your AI. Your AI will write your code, you’ll end up with some really great products out of it that way. This is a trend that doesn’t go away. It’s a trend that continues to grow. It’s a trend that I’m excited about. I’m excited to see how far we can take it.

Mike Boyle:

Well guys, continuing with the alphabet game here, speaking about AR and VR, augmented reality and virtual reality, Ben wanted to get your thoughts on where things stand with those two things here in 2022?

Ben McCarthy:

Yeah. I think it’s super early days, still. I mean, obviously Facebook have rebranded to Meta and are building out what they think is going to be the future, which is the Metaverse, which we’re all going to kind of “live in” in the future. But I still think it’s very early days. I use VR for gaming at home, and the headsets as they stand at the moment, you can’t wear them for more than an hour. Your neck hurts. You’ve got this half a kilogram weight on your face and it kind of makes your eyes hurt after a while as well. That’s what I think, anyway. So yeah, I think it’s very early days, but I think it’s very exciting, the potential in the future. If the Metaverse does happen, instead of Google Meets, instead of Zooms, we could be having VR, AR type meetings in the Metaverse where we’re walking around, we’re shaking hands with people, and talking to people with really good graphics that makes it seem like real life.

It kind of seems like a logical evolution from where we’ve come from in the technology world and where we’re heading. So I think although Meta are getting a lot of ridicule and their stock price is massively down, I think they are probably onto something and I think it’s kind of inevitable. But then I also think that we could just be seeing another kind of 3D TV trend here. Those popped up about 5, 5, 6 years, probably longer than that, 10 years ago or something like that. Everyone hated them and then they died and went away. So we could be seeing that, but I’m probably on the side of the Metaverse actually happening and us gaming and having some of our personal life and work life in the Metaverse.

Something that I did see that was quite cool the other day was a friend of mine showed me an app that they’re building, which it was performing sales training in the Metaverse. It was giving sales people a training environment. And obviously when you’re in VR, for anyone that hasn’t done it, it is extremely realistic. It’s very immersive. And it feels like you are wherever the VR places you. I thought that was a, that was the first, I guess, workplace example I’ve seen of something in VR, which is not above and beyond just meetings, but was a sales training scenario kind of game, which I think was quite cool. But yeah, very early days, I think.

Mike Boyle:

Got you. You are listening to the Salesforce Simplified podcast from Ad Victoriam Solutions. I’m Mike Boyle, and our guests today are the founder and co-editor of London-based Salesforce Ben, Ben McCarthy, also the non-executive director at Cloud Orca, a London-based consultancy, and our president here at Ad Victoriam Solutions, Brian Mize. Brian, I wanted to ask you next about distributed cloud. And for those who don’t really understand what that is, maybe you could talk a little bit about what it is and what your vision is for 2022 and beyond?

Brian Mize:

Distributed cloud really is the ability to take computing needs, resources, storage cycles, and distribute those across whether we’re talking public clouds, private clouds, we distribute them across broad ranges. What that gives the end user or the customer the ability to do is to flex to scale. You need more processing time, you need more processing capabilities to scale up. If you need less, you can scale down, but it gives you some flexibility and it takes greater advantage of the resources that are out there and available.

If we go back to the 90s, almost everything was on premise, so you had your servers in a server room and you had all of your applications running on one or more servers. Maybe you load balanced them out and you had your end users that would use either dumb terminals or other avenues to access those. And then really towards the late 90s, we saw the advent of distributed cloud computing, and Salesforce was on the cutting edge of that with building the data pods and getting access to your system and your data, really, across the country where you might happen to be through North American pods and then globally as well.

That expanded out from on premise, to public cloud, to now we have edge computing where you can conduct a large portion of the computations, a large portion of the data, for example, right on your smartphone. You do the work on your smartphone, your smartphone syncs up to the cloud, and then it gets to where it needs to. As we look ahead, Salesforce takes advantage and offers some edge computing, certainly some distributed cloud. And the goal of it all is to take the data, to take the processing, to take the need, and get it as close to the end user as it can be so that you have faster time. You have faster response time, you have quicker throughput on what you need. You can make the decisions when you need to make them, you can make them much faster. Public cloud, private cloud, combination, having some on-prem work there as well, and then bringing edge to it, that’s going to continue to expand as well and that has taken on new life, if you will. Even as the pandemic started through streaming services, Hulu, and all of the others that are out there, needing to get their data closer to the end user so that the internet can continue to function for business and for end user alike.

Mike Boyle:

Ben, for you, one that, I don’t know, could it maybe have ramped up a little bit, the talk of location-less organizations, because of the pandemic, are we starting to hear that term, location-less organizations, more as a result?

Ben McCarthy:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I think obviously that the entire globe went through some version of, well, especially businesses and B2B, going through being office-less for quite a good portion of the past couple of years. I think a lot of us were living and breathing it, but I definitely think that the trend is going to continue, and I think this is for the better. I remember getting asked a few weeks ago what some benefits out of the pandemic, and I thought this definitely is one. It’s accelerated the mindset of, I guess, older school companies that don’t think employees should be trusted to work from home. I’ve always been a huge fan of flexible working, and working from home, even if it’s not constantly, but having the option to. I just think it makes for a better work-life balance and allows you to get things done at home that you might not otherwise be able to do if you’re at work five days a week.

I definitely think we are living and breathing this. And obviously, Salesforce is kind of at the heart of this. Any companies that were on, I don’t know, Excel, or on-premise servers or something like that still, it just accelerated the digital transformation they were inevitably going to have at some stage. And towards the end of 2020, Salesforce acquired Slack. And it took a while for that acquisition to go through. I think it took a year or 10 months or something like that. But now, they’re starting to integrate the products more. They’ve come up with their whole digital HQ message, which they’re currently using to sell Slack as well as the wider platform, which essentially, I suppose, digital HQ is pretty much the same as look at location-less organizations.

I don’t think offices are going to go away forever. I think meeting in person… I mean, I work from home at the moment and I really look forward to the time I have an in-person meeting, which I think is the way it should be as opposed to not wanting to go to them for whatever reason. I’m really, really positive about location-less organizations, and I think tools like Slack, and especially when tools like Slack are integrated with a CRM like Salesforce, it just makes things very seamless. And for anyone that was… I know a lot of people, when we were going through the pandemic, were worried that collaboration, and productivity, and all these things within teams would drop off, but I don’t think we’ve seen that at all.

In fact, I remember Salesforce, Gavin Patterson, I think he’s CRO globally, said that they’ve actually seen an uptick in meetings with decision makers since the pandemic. I can only imagine that this is because maybe decision makers are happier to meet remotely instead of committing for a meeting where people are flying over from, in the UK they would fly from Ireland to meet people in the UK. It’s asking a lot of someone and you might be less keen to do that, but just hopping on a quick call to discuss something, people are happier to do. I think it’s a very positive thing, and I think we’ll see more of it in the future.

Mike Boyle:

The next technology trend on our list, Ben, is increase in demand for certifications. Now, I’m sure you’re like me. I love going on boards like LinkedIn or other tech boards and having somebody put up their brand new certificate, and you’re proud of them, and you congratulate them, and you just really feel really good for them. Talk a little bit about this increase in demand for certifications, because it’s something you know a whole heck of a lot about. You deal with it every day at Salesforce Ben.

Ben McCarthy:

Yeah. So we’ve always, I mean, we’re coming up to be eight years old now, and we’ve always liked posting about certifications, giving people tips, and promoting what they can do for your career. I think we’ve definitely seen a shift over the past few years, and I think people in the Salesforce ecosystem have thought this for a while, but basically, there’s been a trend of people thinking that degrees aren’t necessarily a requirement anymore. And a Salesforce certification can be a substitute for that. I mean, I did an IT degree at uni and it did help me massively in the Salesforce world, cause I had a lot of the background knowledge, but when I first joined Salesforce, I went into a graduate class and I was the only one that had an IT background.

Ben McCarthy:

People had politics degrees, geography degrees, English degrees, none of which would really give you any skills for a technical Salesforce job. But it didn’t really matter because as long as you’re smart, and you’re dedicated to learning a new skill, you can get certified in Salesforce. And then with a bit of luck or with a bit of experience, you can quite easily land yourself a job without a degree.

When I used to run a Salesforce consultancy, we never looked at a degree because it just wasn’t necessary. We would just look for their Salesforce experience. I can only really speak to the demand for certifications in Salesforce, but I think a lot of people are going through this mind shift now where a university degree isn’t necessary. And if Salesforce is to continue growing at the rate that it is, it’s going to need so many new people from outside the ecosystem to train up. I think if you’re just choosing people with degrees, then I don’t think that’s the way to go. Yeah, I think it’s very right that there’s an increase in demand for certifications, because they can help people land jobs in tech.

Mike Boyle:

And Brian, I’m not going to put words in your mouth, but I know you’re just as proud every time you see somebody on our team getting a new certificate.

Brian Mize:

Absolutely. And I’ll echo what Ben said. We have hired people here at AdVic that have degrees, that don’t have degrees. I myself, very similarly, have a degree in computer science. And when I got into the Salesforce ecosystem way back in 2002, 2003, there were no certifications. But as we moved ahead in finding people that could do the work and then making sure that they had the capability and getting them the training, and then certainly Trailhead coming online, and a host of other avenues that Salesforce has made this training available to people wherever they happen to be in life if they just take the step forward. If they go through the training, they get the certification. And then here at AdVic, we have a great program where we recruit directly out of colleges, and out of the Pathfinder program, bringing people on board, making sure that they get the training, that they are able to take the certification.

And then, and this is really key to it, that they’re able to get the experience for the certification that they have. You can have 10 certifications, but with no experience, it becomes really difficult to go into an enterprise or to go into a larger business and affect change because you just haven’t seen some of the work done across the board. It’s the combination of those two things that become more important than the degree, I think, over time. But we still do value the degree. Certainly if somebody has that, it gives us a different way of looking at things sometimes. But certifications going to continue to grow, going to continue to be a must.

Mike Boyle:

The last tech trend I wanted to discuss with you two today is really in the Salesforce world, what you see going on with Salesforce and what might be coming from them. Ben, you wrote a terrific blog the other day about Salesforce NFT cloud. I’m just wondering, would you put that in a trend coming from Salesforce?

Ben McCarthy:

Yeah. I mean, it’s obviously a bit controversial, which is kind of why I wrote the article, because there was a huge amount of, I would say mostly negative, opinions flying around as soon as they announced that. There’s currently a petition going around in inside of Salesforce asking them not to sell it for environmental reasons, because the blockchain and NFTs built on Ethereum, takes a huge amount of power and isn’t environmentally sustainable. But I don’t think the comments were reacting to that. I just think, I don’t know. I just think people have got quite a negative idea about NFTs, possibly because they just hear it as a buzzword and to don’t really understand it.

I’m on the fence. I think there are quite a few negatives around NFTs at the moment. I think to some degree, a lot of NFTs are kind of Ponzi schemes, where they get as many people to buy them as possible, pump up the price, and I would imagine then, the people who make more, people have the most would sell them and then walk away with quite a bit of profit. But I also think there’s a huge amount of practical application with NFTs for independent artists to sell directly to the public. Something that keeps being talked about is the way that recording artists can put up their songs via an NFT, and then anyone that uses them, they would get paid a certain amount of royalties, things like that. I don’t know how these things would be implemented in a practical sense, but I think it is really exciting.

I think Salesforce always try and be on the cutting edge of whatever is going on in the general market, so I think it’s pretty cool they developed this, but I think the sustainability issue, especially when they’ve just announced sustainability as one of their fifth core values for the entire company, is something that’s going to be a bit hard to get around. But I believe they’ve come out saying that they will offset any carbon emissions and things like that generated by NFTs with other initiatives. I’m not sure if they came out with that after the petitions started going around, but I’m excited by… I like to keep an open mind with these things, so I’m looking forward to see what Salesforce do with that.

Mike Boyle:

And for anybody who’s a little confused about NFTs, what they are, I highly recommend you reading Ben’s article, because he has a whole section where he spells out exactly what they are and what they do. Don’t be frightened by it. Go read the blog.

Ben McCarthy:

Thanks, Mike.

Mike Boyle:

Brian, any thoughts from you on Salesforce tech trends that you see coming down the road?

Brian Mize:

I think Salesforce is going to continue to do what they have done well, and that is look across the enterprise, look across business, look across the needs, and whether through acquisition or through growing it up internally, to find new ways to provide for the needs of business, to provide for the needs of the end user, and to do so in a responsible way, as Ben said, that is sustainable, that does meet the values that Salesforce lives by. We’ve seen this even over the last couple of years with vaccine cloud and a host of other things. They’re going to continue down that path looking across MuleSoft acquisitions, certainly bringing Slack in. I think as we continue to move ahead, there’ll be more and more focus on continuing to keep remote employees engaged, continuing to keep remote employees, remote customers, engaged through the B2C, B2B2C, B2B, through all avenues of that, and at the end of the day, providing an experience that is worthy of having the Salesforce name at the top of it.

Mike Boyle:

Ben and Brian, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts today on emerging tech trends and also those related to Salesforce. I feel like we covered a lot of ground here and we could have probably gone on for hours, so that just means you’re going to have to come back again and we’ll go deeper. Deal? Get you both back?

Ben McCarthy:

Sounds good.

Brian Mize:

Absolutely.

Ben McCarthy:

I’m right there.

Mike Boyle:

Cool! Hey, if you want to learn a little bit more about Ben McCarthy and his staff’s awesome content, just visit salesforceben.com. But I suggest you bring your favorite beverage. Lots of snacks. You’ll be spending lots of time there learning all kinds of stuff, I promise you. And Brian Mize, our president here Ad Victoriam Solutions. If you’d like to get in touch with Brian, just visit the contact page on our website, which is advic.com. Jot a note there, we’ll make sure it gets to Brian.

And lastly, if you happen to be a podcaster and you’re looking for guests on your podcasts who can talk about all things Salesforce, MuleSoft, technology, some of the things we talked about here today, just contact us here at Ad Vic. We’ll hook up with one of our experts. Again, go to the contact us page. Jot us a little note, advic.com, we’ll put you in touch with one of our experts. I’m Mike Boyle from Ad Vic. Thank you for joining us for our latest Salesforce Simplified podcast. As always, our next episode is just around the corner.