Greetings from Dreamforce! Constellation analysts have analyzed all the announcements made by Salesforce, and have compiled a rundown of the top announcements for their coverage areas.
Continue checking the Constellation blog for ongoing coverage of the announcements made at Dreamforce 2015.
Alan Lepofsky - Integration with Microsoft Products Reduces Friction, Boosts Productivity
Yesterday at Dreamforce, Salesforce and Microsoft announced that in 2016 they will be delivering integration between the Salesforce Sales Cloud and various Microsoft productivity tools such as Skype, OneNote and Delve. This will provide joint customers a more seamless experience, reducing the need to jump back and forth between multiple tools.
Salesforce also introduced SalesforceIQ, which ties Salesforce CRM records to a person’s email and calendar. With these items linked, Salesforce can provide more context around key events, such as showing the account records of the recipients of an email, or the outstanding tasks linked to the attendees of a meeting.
Finally, Salesforce introduced a brand new web interface for Sales Cloud, which they call Lightning. This new interface updates the current decade old UI, providing a modern and highly customizable experience.
Read more about the Salesforce/Microsoft integrations
Connect with Alan Lepofsky: @alanlepo
Natalie Petouhoff - Hopeful Salesforce's IoT Cloud Delivers Customer Experience
Customer Experience IoT is developing very quickly, powered by companies like Salesforce who recently announced the IoT Cloud.
The future of customer experience is Customer Experience IoT. The promise of this technology is as follows: as products become services, companies will receive a bevy of information about their customers. Soon IoT will enable companies to track their customers' sentiments about products, and use the data to deliver personalized experiences en masse.
Keep in mind, in order to effectively implement these technologies and make use of the data being received, most businesses will need to undergo organizational change. Leadership will need to be comprised of leaders who understand digital business, and can pass that vision along to every employee. If your company is set in its ways, do not expect to take advantage of Customer Experience IoT.
The bottom-line: customer experience is the new business currency and the path to business growth is via the IOT Customer Experience Cloud. (Note: privacy and protection of customer data will be the downfall of IOT customer experience clouds and software companies that are really dedicated to make it secure will have the competitive advantage to help their clients take advantage of the most important business transformation since the industrial age.)
Connect with Natalie Petouhoff: @drnatalie
Doug Henschen - Salesforce Makes Wave Analytics Wave Accessible, Affordable
Salesforce has revamped its Wave Analytics Cloud to embed insights directly into CRM, but the real winner for customers will be a bevy of new, pre-built sales, service and third-party analytic apps. The big Wave news here at Dreamforce 2015 is the pending (mid October) release of the Sales Wave Analytics App. The company is still hasn’t detailed pricing, but the word on the street is that this pre-built app will be around $85 per user, per month and will give sales executives and teams the most sought-after sales insights. Salesforce has also improved Wave integration within applications and the extended platform.
The real news with Wave Analytics Cloud, is the imminent availability of ready-made sales, service and third-party analytic apps that should lower the cost of Wave entry. Some customers will still want to use the general-purpose Wave Analytics analytics platform, which can be used to build any type of analytical application. But I expect the pre-built sales and service apps to bring the vast majority of Salesforce customers and users the insights they most need. The exact cost per-user, per app and the availability of bundling or multi-app discounts will make or break this second breaking of the Wave Analytics Cloud, so stay tuned for those announcements in October.
News Analysis: Inside Salesforce Wave Analytics
Read more about Wave Analytics Cloud
Connect with Doug Henschen: @dhenschen
Holger Mueller - Build Apps Faster with App Cloud
The key announcements at Dreamforce so far have touched key technologies for next generation Applications. Salesforce's new App Cloud will offer better integration between force.com applications and Heroku-based applications. As Heroku runs on AWS, this is the first cross-cloud PaaS announcement in the industry, something we will see more of. Cross-cloud PaaS makes it easier for enterprises to build next generation capabilities by enabling organizations to leverage the best of Salesforce platforms in one cohesive application.
The announcement of Salesforce Thunder as part of the IoT Cloud is significant because Thunder helps to connect IoT data volumes with Salesforce transactional applications. This enables enterprises to react to IoT signals directly in their Salesforce applications.
Read more analysis about Salesforce App Cloud, Analytics Cloud, IoT Cloud
Connect with Holger Mueller: @holgermu
Steve Wilson - Salesforce's IoT Cloud Presents Opportunities to "Tame" Information Glut
Salesforce with their announcement of a new "IoT Cloud" powered by their Thunder analytics engine, are part of a new wave of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers to understand the power they bring to the Internet of Things. The need and the opportunity is not just about interconnection - it's about taming the information, and more.
We typically think of IoT as the computerization and connection of everday objects. The result of this interconnection is usually either automation or control (using in-car console to activate air conditioning before arrival at the home), but the really disruptive benefits of IoT will be much less manual, with machines and algorithms cooperating automatically.
Bandwidth and availability will be key. Frankly I'm bored with the predictions of 100s of billions of devices being online. Far more impressive is the data; a modern car for instance may generate a gigabyte of data every second. How much of that will have to get out into the Internet to do anyone any good? How much will be pre-processed onboard, and how much will need to be crunched in the cloud? The mix is going to be critical, for the IoT must be about all the decisions and actions passed along from system to system.
That's the rationale for Salesforce's "IoT Cloud". As with any data processing, IoT data is nothing without analytics, rules, and feedback loops. Salesforce is bringing its Big Data capabilities to the Internet of Things, so that the flood of data from appliances, tools, machinery, buildings, vehicles and instrumented goods can be rendered sensibly and acted upon. We can expect the Salesforce PaaS ecosystem, packaged anew as "IoT Cloud" to breed a host of new data supply chains, intelligent agents and intermediaries.
"IoT Cloud" may look like marketing, but the information management aspects of the Internet of Things are only now taking shape commercially. The stupendous volume and velocity of data in the IoT, and the complexity of responses to it all, makes the case for analytics-as-a-service more compelling than ever.
Connect with Steve Wilson: @steve_lockstep