The Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud aims to be a customer success platform. That was the message underlined by company executives at Dreamforce 2015 in San Francisco, which ends today.
In his keynote, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said that digital revolutions in five major areas—cloud, mobile, social, data science, and the Internet of Things—had still left “an unbelievable gap between companies and customers.” The technology to help companies succeed was already there, but it needed to create success for customers too. “Welcome to the Internet of customers,” he said.
Introduced by Stevie Wonder singing “Superstition,” Benioff described Salesforce.com as “the world’s most trusted enterprise cloud,” processing some 234 billion transactions per day. The core of the keynote, however, was a series of enhancements to the platform demonstrated by cofounder Parker Harris, who joined Benioff dressed in a “Lightning Man” superhero costume.
Last month Salesforce announced its Lightning Experience, a desktop app with a modern interface optimized for speed, as an alternative to the classic Salesforce UI. Harris described the roll-out as “the biggest thing we’ve done since we started the company.” Customers can toggle between Lightning Experience and the classic UI, which Salesforce will continue to support. Lightning Experience also includes a visual app builder. Customers will be able to use drag-and-drop to create apps from a library of configurable components.
Lightning, of course, precedes thunder, and the big announcement at Dreamforce was the IoT Cloud powered by Thunder. An events processing engine, Thunder will capture real-world customer IoT events and make them available the Salesforce marketing cloud where they can be used to update customer profiles and make engagement recommendations. Microsoft Azure is the launch partner for the IoT Cloud.
Benioff also announced innovations springing from the acquisition of RelateIQ last year. Salesforce IQ for Salescloud, with its Chrome extension, imports CRM information directly to email inboxes, making it unnecessary to switch between apps. SalesforceIQ for small businesses integrates email and calendar clients with CRM, automatically surfacing potential deals and prospects, and even helping to plan meetings by suggesting times and attendees.
Benioff also took time to highlight Salesforce’s philanthropic mission. Each day of Dreamforce focused on a different cause: veterans; K-12 education (Salesforce Foundation launched a one million book donation drive); women in technology; and the environment. Nonprofit attendees made Dreamforce 2015 the largest nonprofit technology conference in the world, and Dreamforce has raised $36 million over the past five years for childrens’ hospitals. “As we built this incredible company,” Benioff said, “we built it the right way: with philanthropy built in.”
On track to become the world’s fourth largest software company in 2016, Salesforce said there were more than 170,000 registrants for this year’s Dreamforce conference. Some 10 million people joined online, and about 400 Salesforce customers participated. There were 1,600 sessions, and Benioff said: “I expect you to attend every single one.”
