Headless on Salesforce: 30th March 2022

If you speak to certain companies, they would accuse Salesforce of being old school and not having a proper headless proposition: they'd be wrong.

Salesforce was founded in 1999. There aren't many businesses that have managed to continually reinvent their technology over such a lifespan. In 1999 we didn't have the concept on headless. That being said, Salesforce was the first company to ship a commercial API in 2000.

Fast forward to 2022, and everything in Salesforce is being built API first. This concept of building the functionality and making it available as an API first, before adding any user interface is popular. This is because it means new features are built at their core to be API delivered, and not depend on logic that's in the user interface.

If we look at many of the latest iterations of Salesforce's products such as Order Management, B2B Commerce, Loyalty Management and more, we can see this pattern time and time again. This enables all of these products to act as headless systems, offering their APIs to various heads with ease: websites, mobile applications, TVs, etc. More mature products such as B2C Commerce have had a powerful API layer for many years (Open Commerce API) and now are getting further APIs and microservices added to further enable headless use cases.

The time has come to realise that Salesforce can be used in popular approaches to assembling a technical stack. One is a platform play: purchasing various systems from one provider. The other is the best of breed approach: pick the right systems for you, from any vendor, using their APIs to integrate. With Salesforce both are strong options.

Time to stop listening to the naysayers, and realise that like many times before, Salesforce has leading technology you can be proud to adopt.

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