Video: Architecture Insights for the Salesforce Ecosystem | Duration: 3300s | Summary: Architecture Insights for the Salesforce Ecosystem

Transcript for "Architecture Insights for the Salesforce Ecosystem": Good afternoon, good morning, and welcome so much to today's webinar. This is architecture insights for the Salesforce ecosystem. Here at Salesforce then, we offer practical, relevant, and accurate information in many different forms from our blogs that you know and love to our YouTube channel, our podcast, and also our surveys which we now run annually. And that's where the data from today's webinar is going to come from from hundreds and hundreds of architects across the globe. My name is Christine Marshall, and I'm the technical content lead at SalesforceBen. And I'm really, really pleased to be joined today by our sponsor by Savan. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Odeseva? Christine. Thank you for having me. So I'm Suvan, CEO and founder of Odesiva, but also a CTA. And Odesiva is a platform, on that exchange, supporting more than 100,000,000 users and doing data security in data management. Thank you so much. Well, what are we gonna talk about today? Well, today, we're gonna look at those insights from our survey. We're gonna look at things like diversity, equity, and inclusion, architect career satisfaction, top skills, lowest skills. We're gonna talk about security and third party vendors, certifications, and the all important CTA, and we're also going to touch on AI. Now for anyone wondering, we will share the recording of this session with you after the event finishes today. And the lines are muted, but we have our chat, and we also have our q and a. So if you've got any questions, then please please do put them in the q and a because we'll have a dedicated section for that later on. Why don't we kick off the chat then by oh, okay. Someone just said they couldn't hear me, but we're all good. So we're gonna kick off by talking about DEI, and we'll start with gender diversity in the architect space. Now it may come as no surprise that there is a significant imbalance of females versus males by approximately 208% more males to females from our survey respondents. But there is some important nuance to take into consideration when we look at this survey data, and that's what we're actually seeing an influx of women in the earlier years of their architect career, so those with one or two years of experience. So that's a bit of a promising sign of momentum. Now interestingly, nearly 60% of female architects are in solution architect roles, while far fewer are in the technical architect positions. So this suggests that while more women are entering architecture, there's still a gap when it comes to the slightly higher up architect roles. So, Suvang, how does that data correlate with what you've seen in the IT sector in general or across other technologies? So that's actually a a KPI we measure at our board with our investor. So the industry in general in the tech industry, has around 25%, female. So Salesforce is actually doing excellent, when you compare, like, with the rest of the industry where Salesforce are actually more female and non binaries than the rest of the industries. Well, that's really good to hear. And we've seen really promising diversity across our surveys. When we looked at the admin survey, we had about a fifty fifty split of men and women. And so it's good to see that the number of female architects is increasing as well. So the next thing we wanted to cover was age. Now the data on age is what we would expect with the majority of respondents in the thirty five to forty four age group. That's around 45% of our survey respondents. So do you think that correlates with what you've seen as well? Yeah. And, also, I think architect is not the first job you get. You start by, early on in your career, with admin consulting job, And then I think architect is more like, some, job that you evolve to. That can also be a stepping stone for, additional roles in the future. So definitely correlate with what we're seeing in the market. Yeah. So we also asked about, ethnicity. Now it's important to note that the majority of our respondents come from North America, from The UK, from Europe, so that does correlate with the high number of people identifying as white or Caucasian. What I would say here is we would really love to see a lot more diversity in the respondents to our surveys. So if you didn't complete the architect survey this time, perhaps when we do it next year, that could be something that you take part in because we would really like to see more people, more diversity, and more experiences being covered in our surveys. We also asked about disability. And of the seven point five percent of respondents who reported having a disability, a mental health condition was the most prevalent. So that was eighty percent of all reported disabilities. Now I think that is particularly worrying because something else that our survey flagged up was that over a third of architects are thinking about leaving the role. Now that's quite a big number, and it does raise some important questions about the well-being of sales with architects. Are they feeling burnt out? Are they feeling frustrated with the career growth? Is it the time and cost of going after something like CTA? Perhaps it's a little bit of all three. Do you have anyone who's experiencing things like burnout or has considered leaving the Salesforce architecture career path, Sevan? We've seen a few. So that's why it's always important to care for others and, you know, like, open our eyes and be there to to assist. And, yeah, I think we have a great, community that help each other. So this is very important. It is really important. I think especially as we've seen things like the well architected program at Salesforce be shut down, there is a bit of an absence, I think, of community feeling for architects. But there's, architect dreaming is one of the not new events, but has been around for a couple of years. And I've heard really great things from architects that have attended that who get a lot of benefits out of attending and being able to be in a room where there's other architects and aspiring architects. So it's good that there's this great community that is still out there. So for our next point, we want to talk about career satisfaction. How happy are Salesforce architects? One of the questions that we've taken to asking in our surveys is whether or not people agree that Salesforce is becoming increasingly complex to work with. So 66.6% of, Salesforce architects agree that it is becoming more complex to work with, but 65 and a half percent of architects report that they are somewhat satisfied or satisfied with their skill Now when we asked architects how confident they feel in their skills, the results were pretty telling. Enterprise and technical architects reported the highest satisfaction with where they're at, but roles like data architects, solution architects, and integration architects showed lower levels of confidence. So not necessarily dissatisfaction, but definitely a sense of room to grow. What do you think to that, Savannah? The way I interpret that slide is that Salesforce is becoming a richer and richer ecosystem. And if you had, like like, ten years ago, it was mostly on the platform, whereas today with, the recent acquisition, from Informatica to Tableau or Slack, that used to be different companies, like, it's part of the Salesforce ecosystem. So that's why you have, like, a very rich platform. And, the role of the architect is to actually analyze the pros and cons of all of those, you know, components of the platform and select, the one for the right needs. So I I see it more as a as a great opportunity for architects to demonstrate value and help, the customer to kind of make the maximum, return on investment, on their self worth investment. So this is a bit of a sneak peek webinar, which we quite like doing. The survey white paper is written. It's currently in its design phase, but the survey goes into much greater depth into skills and what Salesforce architects are doing outside Salesforce. What are they integrating with? What non Salesforce certifications are they doing? Are they working with other platforms besides Salesforce? So, hopefully, that survey should come out towards the July, and that's gonna have even more data and even more data points around architects. So keep an eye out for that. So, again, continuing with the idea of career satisfaction, we have a bit of an interesting mix going on with the data. So 75% of architects say they're satisfied with their careers, and around 43% want to keep doing what they're doing. That's great. But at the same time, nearly 38% are considering leaving the architect role in the next two years. So there's clearly a bit of a disconnect. And a big thing that people have flagged is rapidly changing technology. Fifty seven percent of architects see that as the biggest career risk. Now depending on where you are in your career, your concerns shift. We noticed that early career architects are more anxious about AI and tech evolution, whereas the more experienced architects are worried about rising competition in the ecosystem. So while satisfaction is high, there's definitely a bit of a sense of volatility under the surface. So let's talk a bit more about those skills of Salesforce architects. And one question we do hear a lot is how much hands on work do architects actually do, or is it just diagrams and soft skills? Well, our survey reveals that most architects definitely do get their hands dirty still with 94% reporting doing hands on work to some degree. Data architects tend to be the most hands on of all with half saying that most of their work is technical and build focused. And where you work makes a big difference as well. So 43.8% of architects are end user organizations, so Salesforce customers, say hands on work is a big part of their role compared to just 22.1% at consultancies. Sylvain, in your experience, do you become more hands off as you progress in your architect career? We usually see the contrary. Like, you are less and less hands on, in the architect, job. However, there are some architect that specialize in performance management that typically will require to be hands on. You can be also like a developer architect. So there are path for, I would say, every way where you want your career to evolve. So it's not necessary, like, architect will lead to a management role. If you are not, happy with your role of management, there are definitely options for you to grow your career in, still hands on and, specialist role. Perfect. So we also ask people about their skills, about their declarative skills, and about their programmatic skills. And we do see that the declarative tools are scored higher than the programmatic tools. So so architects are saying that they feel more skilled or more equipped in the declarative tools. And then we asked architects to rate the most important skills, and communication came out in the top spot by quite a landslide followed by diagramming skills, no code skills, project management, DevOps, and coding skills were at the bottom of the list and were considered by our survey respondents to be the least important skill in the architect skill set. Does that resonate with you, Servan? Yeah. This is, really what we see in the market indeed. Yeah. So I think it will really surprise people, though, to see coding come bottom of the list. There's definitely a train of thought that you need to be able to code to be an architect. I wonder if that's because things like the PD one are part of those certifications when you're climbing the architect pyramid. Perhaps that's where the idea comes from. So another interesting topic then, we've asked people if Salesforce is becoming more complex. And if we're being realistic, no one can master it all. So how do architects decide where to focus? So for most, it's practical. 54 almost 55% say their current job requirements shape their learning priorities, which makes absolute sense. Some people are a bit more proactive, 20% following their personal interests and just over 20% looking at where the market is heading. But what I really liked about this data is that very few architects are being swayed by Salesforce's official road map or what other architects are doing. They are making the decision themselves, so it's being driven by real world context, not just any hype. And as for specialization, the trend is more towards breadth according to our survey. So over 50% of architects specialize in multiple areas, 12% stick to just one area, and the rest tend to be generalist across different clouds, different roles depending on what their job requires. You have some interesting thoughts around being a jack of all trades or a specialist, didn't you? I would like the, the comparison that I would have for an architect is at some point, you need to make a choice in your career. Is do you want to become a generalist, like a jack of all trades, or would you rather specialize and be an expert in one area? And the comparison that I would use is is a bit similar to the doctor. You need different types of doctor. You need the generalist, and then you need the heart surgeon. And one is not better than the other. If you have, you know, like, a a program that is not about the heart surgery, well, the heart surgeon will not be able to help you there. So that's why there is option to kind of do both. And, you have to pick your areas of interest, would you kind of know a bit of everything and then rely on some experts when there is some very, complex use cases, to to be solved? Or you would you rather be one of the best in the planet, on a particular area? And I think Salesforce is, rich enough that now you have that option, to pick one or the other. Yes. Completely agree. So what about different skills? We also ask architects to choose their three most confident and least confident skills, and we saw the highest levels of confidence in problem solving, solution design, and communication. Now it's really positive because communication was ranked as the number one skill for architects, but we also saw in the least confident that was things like programming, DevOps, and security management. Now I would say security management is a really, really important part of architecture, but that's not to say that people aren't doing it, just that they are feeling a real lack of confidence around this at the moment, and I suppose that could be contributes to the fact the security model has become more complex. But I was definitely surprised, Siobhan, to see such low confidence around DevOps because I always considered that to be quite a big part of of an architect's work. Yeah. I agree. And when I saw the result, first of all, like, it does connect with the fact that whenever you enter the the world of technology, well, you are, like, you you like the problem solving. It's kind of a puzzle. You like to solve solve games. So it really makes sense to me that this is the number one. And what you can actually see on the on the on this diagram is where the carrier of the architect evolve. And when you look at the CTA, where you're going to, be evaluated on integration, on diagramming, which is a huge portion of the CTA, or even the DevOps is basically, you're ready to be, passing the CTAs when you are strong in those areas. So it's actually kind of a big surprise to me, that the DevOps has, ranked last because it's in the pillars of the CTA is equally important to the world of security that the modeling, diagramming, integration, and so on. And the way I interpret it, was, they are, materials and moving the code from one environment to another, is a very rich and, complex topic, and there is room to grow for the ecosystem to kind of, get get the knowledge. And that also that explains that, it takes a lot of, experience, practice, to go through the CTA. But, you can also look at that slide as the road map, almost to become a better version of the architect that you are today. Yeah. That's a really good way of looking at it. Well, those were kind of the skills that we asked them about, but we asked around specific tools and features. And, again, not huge surprises here. Three most confident areas, Sales Features, Service Features, not a shocker there at all. Technical solution design, again, that's a really great one to come up top. Least confident though, we saw things like Heroku, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, Salesforce CPQ. It goes on to MuleSoft and Tableau. Now those are quite you know, a lot of these are quite new products, aren't they, Savan? I think there are two reasons to look at it. The first one is, is it a new product or a new acquisition? So definitely, like, when you look at the Tableau 1.2%, it's still a recent acquisition, when you compare to the history of the platform. So it does make sense that it will take a while for that number to grow over the years for cell for for Salesforce and Tableau to be perceived as a a single and unique platform. Then I think the other way to interpret that table is when you look back in the few slides before when you look at the the type of people in responding as an architect, in in the survey, they do state that they are enterprise architect and working in the enterprise, ecosystem. And usually, an enterprise will need architect when smaller companies will just need one admin or maybe two. And that could explain, like, why product like Heroku are probably less used at the enterprise level. It was really an acquisition of Salesforce long time ago, really designed for the for the mid market. So that could explain that this is not just about the time because Heroku is a quite, I would say, old acquisition in comparison to others, but probably the fact that the respondent are from the enterprise, segment. Amazing. Well, for our next section, we're gonna talk a bit about security and third party vendors. Now we worked very closely with Odysseva on some of the questions in the survey as well. So we have some real insights from architects here. So the first one that we asked was, do you believe your Salesforce data backups are more secure when stored separately from Salesforce such as by using an independent backup vendor. Now 41.9% of our respondents said they do feel that their backups are more secure when stored independently from Salesforce. Is that something that you agree with? I say not only I agree with it, I I think the old ecosystem, there is a movement there. So I would start by saying, like, it's kind of, intuitive, when you listen to your grandma that you should not put all of your eggs in the same basket. But if it's obvious, I think, in with intuition, regulation is actually now enforcing it. So when you look at modern regulation, there is a wave of regulation, in the world in general. So if you take one of the last one, which is DORA. So DORA is a regulation for financial services, in Europe. But if you're not even in in financial services, it's interesting to see what's going on because other industries might get the same type of regulation. And then DORA in the article six and twelve insist on two particular areas. Number one, you need to diversify your risk, and the article six recommends to implement a multivendor strategy so that by having multiple vendor, you kind of you diversify the risk profile, of the vendor that you work with. And then on the article in the twelfth, basically, like, the separation of the production environment, like, the the secondary system that is going to protect the first one needs to be as separated as possible to to diversify the risk profile so that the same problem will not lead to the same consequences. And I think it goes back to, like, problem solving and having multiple, options to protect your risk is always the best option. Absolutely. I I think there's some slight misinterpretation of some of the language around Salesforce. You know, one of Salesforce's big selling points was about kind of simplifying your tech stack, being able to bring together different tools for different teams. But that doesn't mean that Salesforce should be your only tool, and doesn't negate the need for having things like independent backups. And, you know, to this point, when we were looking at a few slides before, it's almost the same question about the jack of all trades or the specialist. So you can have a one size fits all, but if you have a size that actually needs specific, a custom tailor made, solution, this is where maybe the independent solution might even be stronger. Yeah. Yeah. So we also asked our architects about executing recovery tests, confirming the efficiency of backups and disaster recovery plans. Because I would say you can it's no good just having a tool. There's no good just having a backup tool. You actually have to test it, execute it, make sure you can react to things like that. And we saw a really vast majority of respondents were unsure about how often they execute recovery tests, and then a small minority says annually. Do these figures resonate with you? So they do. And if you compare when you, release a Salesforce application, there is no way you're not going to do QA. Right? So QA quality testing, making sure that you didn't make a mistake. It's kind of now really obvious in release management. And yet we do see, customers will typically just buy the solution, thinking that it's going to work by design because it's sold by a particular vendor. And, actually, whenever, you're going to buy technology, whatever the use case is, it's always about the three topics. You buy the technology. You need to make sure that the process is working well and that your organization knows that you use that technology and that it's actually compatible with your data model and and processes. And this best practice is now, again, enforced by regulation. So to to go back to the, to the Dora regulation, the article never even didn't make it now mandatory. And before regulation was kind of very legally. Basically, you had to be a lawyer to really be interested by it. Whereas now regulation is kind of very straightforward for our tech. They tell you how to do things, and they say that at their minimum, you should test your DRP or disaster recovery plan at least, once a year. And you can think of it as, like a fire drill. A fire drill is, very important to make sure that, your fire extinguisher is actually working because you don't want to discover that your fire extinguisher is actually expired, the day that your building is on fire. Yeah. Absolutely. So what about additional encryption for Salesforce Shield once data leaves Salesforce and enters an external system? So then for our audience members who perhaps are not so familiar with Salesforce Shield, could you very briefly sort of tell us about it and why additional encryption might be needed? So Shield, contains multiple features, for additional security, from the old trail, to know who has been modifying what and when up to to the 60 fields. Then it contains the event monitoring, to know how the platform is being used by user, and then it contains the encryption layer, to encrypt the data at rest. And then the misconception is to think that data encrypted at rest will be where it should stop at the encryption level, and then you should ask yourself what is actually the risk you are trying to actually prevent. So the the shield solution encryption technology will prevent, an employee at Salesforce to view your data, but that doesn't mean that the hacker outside of the Salesforce, company will not be able to access it typically through a so called query. So if you look at the current hack, there is a zero day of linear ability, today that that got discovered a few days ago. So like any database, like any services, you need to think about encryption as a flow where if you have a weakness during that flow, the attacker will actually attack on that particular weakness. So one of the paradox is you have actually more end to end encryption in your phone with WhatsApp than that you have in an enterprise application, Salesforce. So if for regulatory or for risk management perspective, you need to encrypt the data, in the, address in in Salesforce. It's interesting to think about end to end encryption and making sure that whenever the data will be moving, you will be encrypting it along the way. And a good example of that is once the so called DSOQL query will kick in, then the data will start heading out of Salesforce, and this time, it will be decrypted. So this is where you might actually want to have a look at how to encrypt that flow and bring the same level of end to end encryption that you have on your phone but to Salesforce. And I invite you to have a look at what Odacira does with zero trust, technology. Interesting. Because I thought Salesforce was already enforcing SOCL query encryption with TLS 1.2. So I wasn't aware about this need to encrypt data even more. So TLS 1.2, like, think of it as h t HTTPS. So the data will be encrypted at the network level. So as a hacker, if you were to go to the cable and try to get the information on the network, you will not be able to read because it's HTTPS. But if you are after the network, when you receive the so called data, the data will actually be decrypted. So if you do, for example, select first name from contact, then the first name that you will receive will actually be decrypted, on the other side. Even if it might have been encrypted on Shield, but whenever it it will go through a a so called query and leave Salesforce, it will leave Salesforce unencrypted, which might be either a problem from a relay regulatory standpoint or from just a security standpoint where you actually don't want some cigarettes to fall into the wrong hands. Okay. Well, let's move on to the next one. My my my slides doesn't want to change. Hang on. Here we go. We asked, do you believe purpose built data security and management solutions are necessary when dealing with large data volumes, multi org environments, or other complex factors? Now a whopping 93.2% of our respondents believe that it is necessary. Is that what you expected to see? And would you have any advice to the minority that think it's a one size fits all? So I was expecting such a result when I when I looked at it. I was not explaining 93%. Mhmm. So the LDV, large data volume, performance management is one of the key area, for for for the CTA. And when you know that a Salesforce environment, when you start having, like, a lot of data, the system will not behave the same. So there is a lot of things to be done to start optimizing, and this is when you actually need an architect, to manage the complexity, and not the richness that is being born from having so many fields, so many objects, so so much records in in the system. And the more you have is actually a good thing because it means Salesforce is providing a lot of value, for for the customer. But whenever you have such a huge amount of complexity within the system, then this is where, having solutions that are designed to handle this complexity will be mandatory. Otherwise, it will just time out. So you can buy a solution, doesn't really matter the use case, let's say, something to manage the data. And then if you are facing, NelTV context, it might actually not work because it was designed for the mid market and not for this type of application that will time out, basically not respond, or being very, very unstable, or you have to wait for two days for the query to finish and actually not finish. So this is the kind of things that LDV managements, we're required to have specific solutions. Yeah. Well, so it's good to see that most of our respondents are aware of that and agree. Now we asked a couple of questions around AppExchange and vendors. So we did ask how often people search for a product on the AppExchange to solve a customer's need versus your own customization because there is quite a bit of debate at the moment around build versus buy. Now, again, architects have said about 40%. They said sometimes. And when we dived a bit deeper into that data and there is more on that in the survey, the response was it depends. It depends on the requirements and the need and what's out there. And we also asked how important is expertise in the Salesforce ecosystem when it comes to choosing an AppExchange solution. My personal view is that it's essential. I would always want to work with a vendor that has an in-depth knowledge of Salesforce. And, actually, most people agreed that a vendor with Salesforce expertise is extremely valuable and necessary. That was just over 72%. Only 1.2% said that a vendor with Salesforce expertise is neither valuable nor necessary. So, Ryan, do you have any tips for people if they are searching for a product on the AppExchange or assessing vendors on the AppExchange? At the way the the the way I was reading that slide, so first of all, like, AppExchange is not just a way for, searching application. It's also a way to, like, bring credibility to an application because to be on the AppExchange, you go through the security review, with Salesforce. Typically, you are have a contract with Salesforce. You are a partner that is, being recognized by Salesforce. I think it's more than just searching. What we're seeing in in our, in the enterprise landscape is that, like, the the leaders, on the customer side who are looking for a solution will not just do the app exchange. They will go to trusted advisers. They will go to their, global system integrators. They will ask them for advice. That's why you are seeing this sometimes 40%, because they are actually also asking, for their peers and their trusted advisers who are going to analyze the epic change to find the right solution. So that's why epic change is one of the key element to find a partner for sure. And then the knowledge of, selecting the right tools for the right task is where the architect advisory, will be very important. Mhmm. And I think we spoke about this before, but it can be quite hard to find what you're looking for sometimes on the AppExchange. Quite often, it seems to be sorted by, you know, the most of something, not not necessarily the best for my use case. So I'd like to dive in and read more of the reviews, not necessarily go on the number of reviews or the number of people that have it. But it can be a bit tricky, I think, at the moment to find exactly what you're looking for on the AppExchange. Well, it's almost like a paradox since the AppExchange is going to favor, vendors who we who have, like, more reviews. But, actually, if you target the mid market, you will have more reviews because companies of, let's say, 100 or 200 employees, it's easier to get more reviews this way. So Odaseva, as an example, we have 25% of the global Fortune 500. So the largest companies in the world are relying on our technology, which also means that in some ways, the maximum number of reviews we will ever get is 500 because we target the global fortune 500. And this is where having additional information on how to select, we were talking about the LDV management. You have the concept of security, the breadth of the platform, the customer's ability of it, where you will have to do additional research. We are actually launching an initiative, in partnership with the CTA ecosystem to actually rank, application from an enterprise standpoint complementary to to the AppExchange to help facilitate, how to select an an application in an enterprise context. And with the CTA mindset, the capacity to integrate, the capacity to be performance, the capacity to have high level of security, and so on. Amazing. Well, for our next section, I'm rather excited about it. We're gonna talk about certifications in CTA, and what's extra exciting is that we have a CTA here in Savannah. And I just wanna put a quick reminder out there. We are gonna talk about certifications and then AI, but then we do have a q and a section. So if you've got any questions, pop them in the q and a for us so that we can talk about them when we get there. But let's talk about certifications among architects. So we asked architects how they really feel about Salesforce certifications, and the answers were pretty mixed. 43% said some are valuable, others not so much. Another 14% felt like certifications don't reflect real world skills at all, saying they're too theoretical or lacking in-depth for actual architectural work. Now despite these feelings, we did ask about the quantity of certifications, and most architects do, in fact, hold multiple certifications typically between four and fifteen. So there's a pretty clear message that they are helpful, maybe for baseline knowledge, but they're not seen as a full measure of credibility, and that definitely resonates with what I've heard from the community. And something else that the data revealed was that most certifications cluster around architects with two to ten years of experience. So it seems like certifications are being used more during the early and mid career phases, and more seasoned architects may be relying more on hands on credibility than a certificate. But there is an outlier here. Over 9% of our respondents said they have no Salesforce certifications at all, and that was a bit of a surprise. Now we dived in a little bit more detail, and we are specifically about architect certifications. So not the admin, the advanced admin, the platform app builder, not those, but things like the data architect, the integration architect. So we asked if our respondents had specific Salesforce architect certifications. 65% responded that they already hold one or more. Another 17% plan to take an architect certification, but that still leaves about 17% who have no plans to pursue architect certs at all. So we asked them what is driving people to get certifications. Now for some, it's about visibility. The majority of our respondents said it was to stand out in the ecosystem. Others said it was to learn skills needed for their current role. Others said it was to validate their existing hands on experience. Sorry. We've got a slight typo on that one there. But we also asked about CTA. So that's kind of the big one that we hear a lot about in the ecosystem, but the number of CTAs is very small. So, Ran, do you know roughly how many CTAs there are globally? I don't think the Salesforce on an updating number. I think it's around 400 probably today. I'm I'm not really sure what is the last number. So when we asked if people were planning on doing their CTA journey, Quite a large percentage, 25 almost 26% said no. 26% said not yet. 29% are planning on doing so in the future. A solid 14.4% are already went into their journey to CTA, and almost 5% of respondents were CTAs. We asked them about why or why not to do CTA, and the respondents came back with about five big blockers. Time and effort, the cost of doing the CTA, and then questioning whether the return on investment would be worth it, mismatch with their technical depth and experience, lack of relevance to their career path, and concerns about Salesforce's rapidly evolving landscape. Now when we asked about how to ensure career progression, it was hands on experience that came out on top. 37% think that is the best way to ensure career progression, not necessarily pursuing something like CTA. But how's the CTA? How does that resonate with you? I would say you can perceive the CTAs in, in multiple ways. You can, define it as a goal where it's easier to run when you have something to achieve, then you have a reason to do it. It's also maybe a forcing factor when you give, let's say, your objective that within the next three years, I'd like to pass it. Then once you have your objective, like, you have this forcing factor that is going to cover some areas. Let's take, for example, the example of DevOps that was ranked last in the in the slide. Well, if you know that DevOps is actually one of the criteria, like diagram, creating diagrams is very important to make your thoughts very clear on how to express them, then basically it's going to be a forcing factor to actually address some areas that you're less familiar with or maybe less interested by, and that you maybe not would not have studied, if it was not for that particular goal. From my perspective, the best value that I get from the CTA that is actually not part of the survey is the community. When for the rest of the certification, it's a validation of knowledge, but in some in some forms, you could pass the certification until you get it, which is actually not really possible, I would say, for the CTA. You could keep failing, but if you still try for the certification, the question will kind of be the same, so you will get it. The CTA is different because you are being judged by your peers. And one of the best value I think from the CTA is to actually join a community where it's more than just sending a paper, validating your knowledge, is you're being part of a group where with great people. And this access to the community, I think, is extremely valuable. And, for me was probably one of the best benefits, of, being a CTA. Thank you. Well, our last section then is going to be about AI, which we can't really get away from. It is the hot topic of the moment. I think you'll agree. So nearly 89% of Salesforce architects say they use AI whether regularly or on an ad hoc basis. And the great news is that for those who do, it's clearly making an impact. So we had just over 73% report increased productivity, 65% say it helps them find information faster. 57% reporting greater efficiency. But it's not all upside. There's definitely notes of caution as well. Almost 50% say they have concerns about AI and security. So it looks like AI is becoming a big part of the architect toolkit, but there's definitely still work to do in building trust, safety, clarity, best practices around how to use it. Now we also asked about barriers to entry, how confident do architects feel using things like agent force. And although adoption seems quite high using different AI solutions, using it effectively does definitely come with challenges. Cost is the top barrier called out by 21% of architects. Accuracy after that, and a lack of skills or knowledge at 17% there. When we dive into specifically about agent force, we asked architects how confident they were architecting a solution using it, and the average response was only just over 50%. I'm not surprised because agent force is relatively new. Not that many people are using it at the moment, and it keeps changing Keeps changing. It feels like every day something has changed, whether there's a new feature or a new, tool. It's been renamed. It's got a new UI. And one question that I thought was really useful was asking architects how they felt in comparison to their peers. Now only 18% believe they're ahead in terms of their AI knowledge and skills, and a third, 32.6, feel like they're falling behind, which seems like a bit of a sad, sad number. So, man, how do you see AI fitting in with the architect realm? So what we are seeing in, the enterprise landscape for AI is one of the first challenges, especially when, you you have a multi org context or an LDB context, is AI, makes sense once you have implemented, your data foundation. So you need, for example, your data to be, regrouped, from the multi org to kind of regroup it into a data lake. So, typically, what we're seeing as a challenge for AI for, large customers is to start by getting their data centralized. So we are seeing a lot of projects to implement data lakes where, to have your data in one place from all of your Salesforce environment, but there are more data than just Salesforce. So you can complete your data, and understanding of your customer three sixty with the rest of the architecture landscape that you have. That's why the data lake will centralize all of that data and to extract it LDV at scale from multi org when we schema that keeps drifting every day is generating a complexity that makes it makes it actually hard, to have, like, a fresh data lake, that is fresher, let's say, than one week. Otherwise, you have to fight with those integration to kind of get the data as fast as you can and trying to catch up with the scheme hour change in the data model that is a bit everywhere. So today, we're seeing a lot of, interest from enterprise to actually, centralize this information to then have a full customer three sixty or having all of the data that is, defining what a customer is, and then the AI strategy, will be really good. So and when I was quite surprised when I when I saw the result where there was a mix of, I feel on par, with the architects, around me. The way I personally interpret it, well, I feel on par, with the architect who are probably all who are who are not all of us are falling behind because it's actually hard to become a to be a specialist for technology that is so recent. So the best we can do is try to catch up, learn, find new best practices, sharing information between each other, what makes sense, and so that we can define, what is, the the right standard, for, for an AI architecture. Absolutely. Very, very well said. Well, before we move on to our q and a section, I just wanted to go back and see if I can there we are. So just a reminder, so we've been sponsored to Save by OdaSaver, and Souvann is the, the founder of ODA Saver. But we we didn't talk too much about what you do, and we've also got some free resources for architects as well, which we'll show in a moment. But let's just touch here again on what does ODA Saver do? So we do two things. So we do data security and data management. We are a sell for specialist. So what does that mean to do data security or data management? So security is if you have an asset that is precious, let's say you want to be an AI company, then the first thing is to make sure, your asset will not be stolen, damaged, or corrupted. So we, handle every aspect of security. So there are three of them. You can remember it as CIA, so confidentiality integrity and availability. So the first one is to make sure your data will not be corrupted, with backup. You need to make sure that the good data is not overwhelmed by the bad data with having ten years of, you know, like, a clutter, in your system. So this is when you want to archive. Some PII, actually, you need to be careful when you start moving it to a full sandbox, for example, for training. This is when masking could be very handy. And then encryption is when you want to keep the hacker away, from your very precious data. We talked about, the encryption that is, great if it's end to end encryption, but some data needs to be encrypted in a specific way, like the credit card or the Social Security numbers. And then residency management is a typical compliance topic. If you need to comply with some residency laws, in The US, in China, in Europe, etcetera, that's something that we can help as well. Then privacy is, all of the GDPR, CCPA were to be forgotten, when you need to take action on your data. And then the data trail is when you need to know exactly who has been modifying what and when, across all of your data model. On the data management side, which is another pillar of the of the CTA, so this is about moving your data around, from sandbox to prod, from prod prod to prod, and so on. Multi org insight is, something that helps you measure, your carbon footprint in your Salesforce ecosystem. Yep. And that allows to understand if you have a multi org, which org is actually using which vendor and, how you, your orgs are actually being configured from a security perspective in adoption. Data replication is typically like a data lake, solution where you can, with Fotasyba, we can help you centralize your data with a data lake, either from Microsoft or Google or Amazon, etcetera. And then org portability, every large enterprise invest a lot in self orgs. They create new orgs. They stop orgs. It evolves a lot. So org portability is is about moving data, splitting an org, merging an org, etcetera. And then saving data, of course, for developers, for the DevOps. And then data automation is when you want to basically manipulate your data and, you want to decrease the maintenance cost or or the implemented implementation cost of such, data flow. And this platform is a central platform on top of it. You can install all of those application. And we focus on large enterprise, meaning that if you have large data w more high requirement for security, we should be a great partner for you. Amazing. And I love the statement here, built by architects for architects. We have there we go. We've got some resources from Otisaver here on the screen. You can scan to access those resources. Anything you wanna mention about these? Maybe I will just highlight two of them. So we invest, as a company in the architect, ecosystem. So it's not just Odasiva. So we sponsor an event called the data innovation forum where we invite every Salesforce architect in the world, to present best practices at the last event 02/2024. We had 25 CTAs, from KPMG, PWC, Capgemini, ActionTure, Deloitte, and I'm forgetting many of them that presented amazing content and customer stories on how to learn, how to be a better architect, and learn about the best practices and learn from other experiences, to know what is the new way, to do things. And the second element I would invite you to have a look at is we are going to organize at Dreamforce an architect track, beyond the Aseva technology, of course, to invest in this, community of architect, to basically share best practices, road map, and then, having a lot of presentation, with the ecosystem, at Dreamforce in San Francisco in a few months. I think that will be so valuable as one of the things that came through on the survey in the comments, was people missing the Well Architected program being live and active. So there's a real gap at the moment for architect resources and community determining best practices, so that sounds absolutely fantastic. Now I'll just leave this on the screen for a second for anyone to scan to get access to those resources, but we do have a couple of questions. Now we've touched on large data volumes a couple of times in this webinar. One of the questions was when should we consider that a Salesforce org actually has large data volume? So that's a funny question. It was actually one of the questions that I had at the CTA, when I when I passed, like, many years ago. So the the answer has evolved through the years. So the answer that I gave at the time, was that you start having an LDV at around 100,000,000 records, per per object, but that was the answer that I gave, like, more than ten years ago. In today's world, an LDV is defined by not just having one object that contains a lot of records, but the series of them, that can be actually connected. And the concept of LDV is not just how many records you have, but also how many fields you have. So you have to think about your records as the height and the weight. So if you have a lot of records and if they are very heavy, and a heavy record can be, for example, like, if you have 800 fields and you have a lot of rich text, then suddenly your record will will be very heavy because it's actually hard to take it out through the so called query. So a a very hard LDV will be when you have a lot of records and, a lot of weight. And some of our customers, each ten years ago, we were defining LDV with, let's say, 100,000,000 records, Some of our customers have more than 10,000,000,000 records in a single org, and this is where traditional, let's say, query optimization optimization actually does not apply anymore. You need to start adding a series of optimization, moving some records of platform. You need to, address your, the the way you're going to create this object or even adapting the data modeling. You need to implement some retry strategies. So LDD has evolved in the sense that we follow, the customers where the data is even more important than has ever been before with with AI. And for this to be in, to be working well, you need two things. You need to manage this complexity in the large data volume, but also you need to make sure that the data is of very high quality. Let's say you keep data that is very old and outdated, it's going to pollute, the effectiveness of the AI. So that's why you need to have a holistic approach to your data. And I was mentioning that, LTV is one of the challenge, but it's very important to address the foundation of data, to maximize your efficiency with, with your data. Absolutely. So we've only got a couple of minutes left. So one last question for you, and that is how do you leverage your CTA certification today? So if you remember, like, a few slides ago, there was, the number one skill was problem solving, which I think is more mindset than than than a skill. So, today, I I'm still applying what I learned from that CTA journey of analyzing the pros and cons, addressing a problem, in the mindset that working to solve it, then analyzing all of the options that are available to you, and then picking the one that makes the most the most sense in the particular context. And I would probably also say the resilience, because it's, we mentioned it's a long journey and a lot of efforts to go there. And I'm using well, what I learned from it, like, you have to kind of, try and try and try again until you kind of make it happen. And I think those two areas of the problem solving and, having a fighting spirit is probably what I keep using every day. I love that. Well, I wanna say a really, really big thank you to OdoSaver for sponsoring this webinar and the survey. The survey should be out, safe harbor, July. It is just finishing up its design phase, so keep an eye out for that on Salesforce Ben. And a huge thank you to you, Savannah, for joining us today. It's such a pleasure to get insights from, you know, not just an architect, but from a CTA. And it's been really, really interesting to hear your thoughts. So thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Christine. And lastly, thank you so much to our audience. I hope you found it really insightful. I hope those statistics resonated with you. I really can't wait for you to see the full survey. I wrote it for the data, absolute data nerds, and it's really, really fascinating. So I'm really excited to share that with everyone. But for today, that's it, and we really hope you'll join us for our next Salesforce Ben webinar. Thank you.