Constellation Insights

Salesforce focuses on the personal touch at Dreamforce 2017: One of the busiest weeks San Francisco sees all year is underway, with the start of Salesforce's Dreamforce 2017 conference. As expected, the company has made a slew of product announcements spanning AI, IoT, low-code development and other areas, but there's a clear through-line that will be emphasized all week: Salesforce offers a collection of platforms that can be fine-tuned not just for an organization, but for individual workers' needs and desires. Here's a look at the highlights.

MyTrailhead is a revamped version of Trailhead, the online training service Salesforce first launched in 2014. Trailhead has always used gamification and other modern learning techniques, but the new version adds deep customization capabilities. Trail Maker is a guided setup toolset that companies can use to build out custom training content portfolios, both from Salesforce's library and ones of their own creation. Trail Mixer gives employees and managers the means to pull together bundles of training material for specific roles, and then share them with others. Trail Tracker and Trail Checker focus on accountability, using rewards badges, quizzes and other tools to maintain a record of employees' progress on the training platform.

POV: MyTrailhead is set for a pilot program in the first half of next year, with general availability to follow later in 2018. Based on the descriptions Salesforce provided, the service is evolving significantly. However, unlike Trailhead to date, myTrailhead is a paid service. This is a significant but perhaps not unexpected change. While Salesforce already has had a paid certification program, MyTrailhead represents an additional revenue opportunity; companies who have already embraced the free version may find value in its additional capabilities. Pricing won't be disclosed until the GA date, however, and it is not clear whether a free version of Trailhead will remain in place.

MyIoT is Salesforce's attempt to bring IoT development capabilities to any worker. The initial product is IoT Explorer, which provides a point-and-click interface for developing IoT apps on the Salesforce platform. Salesforce cited use cases that are naturally attuned to its sales, marketing and service milieu, such as if a car dealer created a workflow app that generated automatic service appointment phone calls to connected cars when they reach a certain mileage marker.

POV: Salesforce has relied on partners such as Amazon Web Services for device connectivity, while focusing on providing an IoT application development environment and runtime. Nothing changes in that regard with myIoT; what remains to be seen is how much of its vision of LoB workers spinning up custom IoT apps comes true. Hopefully, Dreamforce will showcase early customers having success with it. IoT Explorer is generally available now with pricing starting at $6,000 per month for companies with enterprise licenses or above.

Salesforce is also announcing mySalesforce, another low-code service for building branded mobile applications; myLightning, which adds more customization and branding capabilities to its underlying Lightning development framework; and myEinstein, for creating AI-driven applications in a point-and-click manner.

Overall, there's a lot on offer at this year's Dreamforce, and we will be following it closely all week.

Broadcom's record bid for Qualcomm and the IoT implications: The semiconductor market was roiled Monday with the announcement of Broadcom's $130 billion takeover offer for Qualcomm, the world's dominant manufacturer of SoC (system on chip) integrated circuits that power the world's higher-end smartphones.

While the proposed deal instantly drew talk of severe antitrust hurdles, Broadcom took a step that could help seed those waters in its favor last week, announcing plans to move its legal headquarters back from Singapore to the United States. It had made the move to Singapore for tax reasons, but cited proposed Republican changes to U.S. tax laws as the reason for the return.

Broadcom is also in the middle of acquiring NXP. The combined company would be the world's third-largest chipmaker after Intel and Samsung, however. (Intel made waves of its own on Monday, announcing a deal with AMD on new processors that combine Intel chips with AMD GPU (graphical processing units), a move that will step up competition with NVIDIA.)

POV: Both the NXP and Qualcomm deals are far from done for Broadcom (and the latter, in particular, depends heavily on borrowing cash, which brings its own challenges), but in the broad strokes are to be expected. IoT market predictions vary, but all of them point to stratospheric rises in the number of connected devices, as well as the average sophistication of those devices over time. That translates into a need for lots of increasingly powerful, yet less expensive chips, and one clear path to that outcome is industry consolidation.

Amazon's new discounting program carries risks: In advance of the holiday shopping season, Amazon has made yet another bold move in a bid to maintain and grow online market share. A new "Discount by Amazon" program applies discounts to items sold on Amazon by third-party sellers, without those sellers needing to do a thing. Amazon gives the discount directly to buyers, while sellers receive their original asking price (and pay the original sales referral percentage fee).

However, Amazon seemingly did next to nothing to publicize the program to third-party sellers, some of whom have bristled over the potential for it to conflict with agreements they have with product manufacturers over publicly posted prices. Such concerns are paramount to more exclusive brands, which in many cases use higher prices as a cachet. Many third-party sellers are themselves aiming for a boutique image, rather than catering to bargain hunters.

POV: Amazon does offer third-party sellers the ability to opt out of the program, but it should have done a better job of publicizing it in the first place. Overall, Amazon must strike a delicate balance between aiming for low-price parity with or victory over rivals such as Walmart (and its Jet.com subsidiary), and the concerns of its third-party sellers, which comprise half of all sales and have profit needs that don't reflect Amazon's ability to spend profiglately to scoop up market share. It will be of interest to see how the discounting program plays out over the next six weeks or so of holiday shopping.