Salesforce Introduces SalesforceIQ, the Thunder Platform, and IoT Cloud at Dreamforce
SAN FRANCISCO — Salesforce, on the opening day of its Dreamforce conference, launched SalesforceIQ, which uses advanced data science to analyze company relationships with prospects, customers, and partners.
The new SalesforceIQ platform, which is based on technology that Salesforce gained in its acquisition of RelateIQ for $390 million in July 2014, includes Salesforce IQ for Small Business and SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud.
SalesforceIQ automatically captures, analyzes, and surfaces information that is relevant for customer relationships from email and calendar apps; uncovers patterns; and proactively recommends actions.
"Today's massive influx in communication data creates powerful signals about the health and potential of business relationships. It also creates a lot of noise," said Steve Loughlin, CEO of SalesforceIQ, in a statement. "With SalesforceIQ, companies can now make sense of this data and pull out insights to drive their businesses forward with intelligence."
Within SalesforceIQ for Small Business, the Suggested Tasks component recommends specific actions to salespeople. With Closest Connections, professionals can identify people in their companies or networks who can provide the best introduction to a target contact or company. And with Intelligence Fields, SalesforceIQ for Small Business helps users prioritize and focus on the most important opportunities in their pipelines.
SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud provides the framework for intelligent iOS, Android, and Chrome apps that allow sales reps to automatically update the status or potential revenue of a deal right from their inboxes. An intelligent feed helps reps stay on top of every deal with Suggested Tasks and Read Receipts. Additionally, Shortcuts allow customers to insert common phrases. Dynamic Scheduling helps create meetings. SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud connects with Salesforce1 so reps can drill into opportunities or accounts from their mobile devices.
"With Salesforce IQ for Sales Cloud, CRM is connected to email," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, during his afternoon keynote before a live audience of 170,000 Dreamforce attendees. "It's helping sales people sell better. Salespeople can create new opportunities right in the app, and a macro is built in for creating responses. It also connects to your calendar to schedule meetings."
According to Benioff, Salesforce IQ for Small Businesses and SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud are the first of many similar apps that will apply artificial intelligence to sales processes.
Pricing for SalesforceIQ for Small Business, which is now available in the United States, Canada, and Australia, starts at $25 per user per month. SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud is currently in beta and will be generally available early next year. Salesforce also introduced Salesforce IoT Cloud. Powered by Thunder, a scalable, real-time event processing engine, IoT Cloud connects billions of events with Salesforce, unlocking insights from the connected world.
"Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of customers," Benioff said. "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."
"With the Internet of Things, everything we do will be connected," Benioff said. "And behind every connected thing is a customer."
Benioff projected the number of smartphones in use globally to reach 6 billion by 2020 and the number of connected devices to reach 75 billion by 2020.
IoT Cloud empowers businesses to connect data from those devices, as well as any digital content, with customer information, giving context to data and making it actionable—all in real time.
Thunder, built on a massively scalable, modern architecture, can listen to the connected world and ingest billions of events a day from any source, including not only mobile and wearable devices but Web sites, social interactions, and more. With IoT Cloud, business users can use point-and-click tools to define, modify, and set rules and logic for events that can trigger actions across Salesforce.
"Our motivation behind Thunder and the IoT Cloud was the mounds of data out there," said Tod Nielsen, executive vice president of Salesforce's App Cloud, in an afternoon session. "Thunder and IoT Cloud empower people to do something with their business logic to better engage with their customers."
The IoT Cloud, he added, "is democratizing cloud data so mere mortals can use it. It enables mere mortals to interact with Big Data."
IoT Cloud will be in pilot the first half of 2016, with generally availability later in the year. When it officially launches, Nielsen expects it to manage billions of actions every day.
Salesforce is accelerating the adoption of IoT Cloud with initial launch partners ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx, and Xively LogMeln.
But those weren't the only partnerships emphasized at Dreamforce. Among other partnership announcements were the following:
- LiveFyre, a provider of content marketing and engagement platforms, is building Salesforce Lightning Components for Salesforce Community Cloud, allowing users to integrate content from external social networks into their Salesforce apps.
- 8x8, a provider of cloud-based unified communications and contact center solutions, is integrating its solutions with Salesforce's Desk.com, which enable customer records within Desk.com to be automatically opened based on inbound phone calls.
- Seal Software is integrating its Contract Discovery and Analytics software to Salesforce CRM.
- Wise.io launched machine learning apps for the Salesforce Service Cloud, allowing users to identify and analyze data patterns from previously resolved service tickets and act as intelligent assistants to help resolve existing cases.
- Eventbrite launched EventbriteSync on the Salesforce App Exchange, allowing users to connect their event data to Salesforce accounts.
- InsideView updated its InsideView for Sales solution, providing Salesforce users with more insight about deals, and launched InsideView Refresh, a solution that cleans and maintains Salesforce CRM records with InsideView data.
- CircleBack launched Contact Cloud, a cloud-based contact data management solution for Salesforce.