This week is Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual takeover of San Francisco to meet with its customers, stakeholders and vendors and fill them in on what’s coming for the next year. This year, one of the biggest new items to drop is Thunder IoT Cloud.
IoT Cloud is designed to connect billions of events from devices, sensors, applications and databases within the IoT to Salesforce, enabling companies to perform analytical research on their customer’s behaviors, wants and needs right inside the most powerful CRM in the world.
This is huge news for the IoT, because so many companies are already using Salesforce for CRM, so integrating Thunder and IoT Cloud will be (finally) a simple and easy way to get some intelligent analytics done on all that data they’ve been collecting. Perhaps it’s bad news for all the analytics vendors out there, now that there’s a 50,000 pound gorilla on deck, with a built-in customer base and platform.
IoT Cloud is powered by Salesforce Thunder, the company’s scalable, real-time event processing engine that allows customers to personalize sales, service and market capitalization. Salesforce already has relationships with ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeIn to join the ecosystem and accelerate IoT Cloud. Emerson and Pitney Bowes are looking to connect with their customers using IoT Cloud.
“Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. “The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time one-to-one, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success.”
IoT Cloud’s capabilities are pretty vast. The biggest thing hangs on the global reach of the Salesforce platform. IoT Cloud connects everything to Salesforce. In addition to sensor devices, it also connects to phones, wearables, windmills and industrial turbines. It marries that environmental and operational data with activity monitoring results from websites, social interactions and more and sends it all into Salesforce’s CRM, bringing global context to customer transactional data.
Image via Shutterstock Business users will be able to use intuitive, point-and-click tools to define, modify and set rules and logic for events that will then trigger actions across Salesforce. A global fleet management company, for example, could enforce passenger safety standards by setting filters for “hard brakes” or “hard accelerations” and defining rules that trigger in-car sensors to log service cases reporting possible instances of erratic driving.
IoT Cloud will be in pilot mode for the first half of 2016, and the company will release it to the general public later next year. Pricing will be announced then.
This is the biggest thing in integrated consumer data analytics for the IoT, and it could transform the way that the millions of existing Salesforce customers enter the industry, and what’s more, give them an advantage over anyone not in the system.
Bring the Thunder, indeed.
Edited by
Dominick Sorrentino
