Ben Kepes, Contributor
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has made it a habit in previous years to “leak” some big announcements in the days and weeks before the company’s annual DreamForce event. This year is no different and last night Salesforce announced Salesforce1, the company’s new platform that is aimed at wrapping all customer related interactions including third party application ones, within a consistent platform. But Salesforce has greatly expanded the reach of what constitutes a customer and the platform is geared to give developers and Salesforce customers the ability to start building applications that not only interact with humans, but also the plethora of connected devices that exist and will exist in the future.
This is a focus that Benioff has signaled for awhile now – he’s famously talked about the Internet of Things (IoT) and the fact that very soon his toothbrush will be able to communicate with the broader internet. This IoT theme is one that has been articulated loudly by General Electric (GE) – indeed GE CEO Jeff Immelt considers his company is primarily a software company – the wind turbines, airplane jet engines and other massive items of machinery they make collect data to be processed by GE software. This analysis then feeds back to create ever-more efficient items that deliver increased value to GE customers.
Benioff has also talked plenty about the mobile revolution that is upon us and Salesforce1 is being talked up as being “mobile first”. Applications and interactions will see mobile as a first class citizen, no longer will mobile applications be afterthoughts. this makes sense – if Benioff’s vision of the IoT is come to fruition, it will be primarily mobile – the toothbrush talking to the personal health application is fundamentally a mobile interaction, the paradigm of a fixed location computer is history in this brave new world.
In terms of what is actually a part of Salesforce1, there are a few distinct parts:
- Far greater Application Programming Interface (API) functionality. Salesforce claims the platform includes 10 times more API feeds from the different Salesforce products than before. This includes streaming APIs that will enable a new level of real-time interactions
- VisualForce, Salesforce’s tool to help deveopers build specific user interfaces for applications within the Salesforce ecosystem will now be able to build mobile applications
- A New AppExchange. Salesforce’s “app store” is getting a refresh with initial partnerships including Box, LinkedIn,Docusign, Evernote, Dropbox, HP, FinancialForce.com, and Concur. These businesses are building mobile-first applications and marketing them on the new Salesforce platform
- Two new mobile applications that enable administrators to manage their Salesforce applications anywhere – these include real-time updates and identity services delivered from Salesforce’s Identity offering
This is a big announcement for Salesforce (and there are some bigger ones to come tomorrow during Benioff’s keynote). It rolls up a number of formerly distinct product areas – Force.com, Heroku, Exact Target, Identity, AppExchange etc. and delivers them as a consistent platform. After last years’ DreamForce event I wrote that I felt Salesforce was finally becoming one of the IT platforms of the modern age and these announcements deliver upon that prediction.
That said there are still some parts lacking that have been glaring omissions for awhile now. Salesforce1 can be likened to PivotalOne, the initiative created with assets from both VMWare and EMC. Like Salesforce1, PivotalOne delivers developer services, platform offerings and a way for connected devices to be part of the new look of IT. PivotalOne however goes further and delivers some analytics offering on top of the platform. The value is obvious – a platform that gives an organization the ability to harness a huge different datapoints from connected devices really proves its value when it is able to analyze that data and derive actionable insights from it. Salesforce’s lack of an analytics play becomes ever more obvious since it’s competition (both from the infrastructure/developer side by way of PivotalOne and from the application side by way of SAP) deliver upon this promise.
I’m expecting Salesforce to correct this omission and signal some real big data analytics functionality soon, possibly even during DreamForce – the need for this extends across the Salesforce platform. It’s enterprise social media tool, Chatter, would benefit greatly from having some smart analytics applies to it – surfacing people, messages and threads of importance is a highly manual process at the moment and that will become problematic as adoption increases.
This announcement is a logical rationalization of the increasingly confusing Salesforce product portfolio – yes there are some glaring gaps in the platform, but I predict those will be plugged very soon. With those caveats resolved, we’re seeing Salesforce start to show us just what the platforms of the future will look like.
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