Salesforce Unveils Breakthrough IoT Cloud, Powered by Salesforce Thunder

This morning Salesforce released information on what is likely going to be the most important announcement of this year’s Dreamforce user conference, currently taking place in San Francisco.

So let’s dissect the press release in our customary style, it can be found here:

SAN FRANCISCO—DREAMFORCE 2015 —Sept. 15, 2015—Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the Customer Success Platform and world’s #1 CRM company, today announced Salesforce IoT Cloud. Powered by Thunder, a massively scalable, real-time event processing engine, IoT Cloud connects billions of events with Salesforce, unlocking insights from the connected world that empower anyone to take the right action, for the right customer, at the right time.

MyPOV – So we learn Salesforce Thunder is a real time event processing engine that connect things with Salesforce applications. It seems to be smart about doing the right thing at the right time.

“Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive officer, Salesforce.“The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time 1:1, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success.”

MyPOV – Benioff explains more what is mentioned above, connect things data with customer data, of course for customer success, which seems to stay as the leitmotiv for Salesforce at this Dreamforce (which is good news – see my blog posts on too many pivots below).

Connected World, Disconnected Data
The combination of mobile, social, sensor, wearable and cloud technologies has triggered a deluge of data. More than 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated over the last two years. And, with the number of connected devices projected to reach 75 billion by 2020, the volume of data available is expected to grow exponentially.

MyPOV – Good point to raise the data volume and deluge, will be interesting how Salesforce plans to scale for it.

This world of connected devices and digital content presents an enormous opportunity for companies to take advantage of the new data. In a June 2015 report, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that IoT applications may have a potential economic impact of as much as $11.1 trillion per year by 2025. However, businesses have been unable to capitalize on the vast volume of data from the Internet of Things.

MyPOV – We know it’s a big next generation application example, and agree that enterprises must have an IoT strategy going forward.

Salesforce IoT Cloud, Powered by Thunder—Connecting to the Internet of Customers
IoT Cloud empowers businesses to connect data from the Internet of Things, 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, ingesting billions of events a day, from any source. IoT Cloud’s capabilities include:

• Listen to the World at IoT Scale: IoT Cloud connects everything to Salesforce. In addition to the Internet of Things, connecting to phones, wearables, windmills and industrial turbines and other devices, IoT Cloud connects data from websites, social interactions and more to Salesforce. By connecting the billions of real-time events and digital content with Salesforce, the IoT Cloud brings customer context to transactional data.

MyPOV – We learn that the Salesforce IoT Cloud has listening capabilities to IoT data and connectivity capabilities not only to the things, but also website, social and more data. So it looks like Salesforce is leveraging some of its social listening and monitoring capabilities (all the way back to the Radian6 acquisition).

• Trigger Actions with Real-time Rules: With IoT Cloud, business users can use intuitive, point- and-click tools to define, modify and set rules and logic for events that can trigger actions across Salesforce. A global fleet management company, for example, can 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. Or, a national retailer holding a holiday sale can set rules based on loyalty program status, inventory or sales performance, triggering retail beacons to send discount offers to in-store shoppers in real-time.

MyPOV – So next to listening Salesforce is deploying ‘triggers’ based on rules. Good news they seem to be able to be even user defined. It looks like Salesforce is leveraging more of the Analytics Cloud (aka Wave) capabilities here (see below for our take on its announcement). Good to see Salesforce making tangible examples.

• 1:1 Proactive Engagement through Salesforce: IoT Cloud seamlessly works across the Salesforce Customer Success Platform to surface insights and trigger real-time 1:1, personalized actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process. For example, a thermostat provider can parse through billions of events gathered from weather forecasts, sensors and temperature settings to proactively alert customers on how to manage their HVAC usage within their predefined budget. Or, a vehicle assistance service partnering with an auto brand can send personalized offers on behalf of local dealers based on sensor data that tracks fluid levels and mileage.

MyPOV – Well that was a table stake – of course an IoT initiative by an application vendor… should work with the applications of that vendor. No surprise, but expected.

Comments on the News
• “Emerson is reinventing customer service,” said Todd Finders, CIO of Emerson Climate Technologies. “By integrating our connected comfort products and services with customer data in Salesforce in real-time, we will be able to address our customers’ needs in a proactive, personalized way.” […]

MyPOV – Always good see customer quotes endorsing the new capabilities in press release.

Salesforce Ecosystem Expands with IoT Partners
Salesforce is accelerating the adoption of IoT Cloud with initial launch partners ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeln that provide connectivity between devices and the Internet. The company will continue to expand its ecosystem of IoT partners to enable businesses to connect with their customers in a whole new way.

MyPOV – Good to see partners on the press release right away. It looks like partners will provide Salesforce with data (ARM, see the recent ‘chip to cloud announcement with IBM on my blog, too), Informatica, Xively LogMeIn and PTC ThingWorx for connectivity and Ehterios on an application side.

Salesforce App Cloud—the Unified Platform for Delivering Connected Apps Fast
Thunder is part of the Salesforce App Cloud, an integrated set of platform services that enable businesses to develop connected apps fast. With services for rapid app development, modern user experiences, integration, mobile app dev, identity management, compliance, governance and more, App Cloud is the most comprehensive and agile platform available to CIOs to deliver their app portfolio. App Cloud also includes an ecosystem of 2.3 million developers, who have built 5.5 million apps, and the AppExchange, the world’s largest enterprise app marketplace, which features more than 2,800 ISV apps and and 40 Lightning Components. All of this runs on the industry’s most trusted enterprise infrastructure that delivers approximately 3.7 billion transactions every business day.

MyPOV – Good to see that this is not ‘another’ cloud, but Salesforce Thunder is part of Salesforce App Cloud (the IoT Cloud is part of it, too then?), always good to see software vendors re-suing assets and creating synergies (see below my take on the Salesforce App Cloud).

Pricing and Availability
• IoT Cloud will be in pilot the first half of 2016 with generally availability later in the year. Pricing will be announced at the time of general availability.

MyPOV – Kudos to Salesforce for sharing ETA and at least give a date for pricing.

Overall MyPOV

It’s good to see Salesforce finding an IoT story, starting with event processing and ‘trigger’ like actions related to events and trends derived from the Things data. Was it 2 (or even 3) years ago when Marc Benioff pulled out his toothbrush doing a keynote, talking about his dentist knowing how well he used the brush? Well, we seem to be closer to realizing this now with Salesforce products and technology, always good for vendors to deliver. It also looks like Salesforce is re-using assets from Salesforce App and Analytics Cloud – which is always a good best practice for software vendors.

On the concern side the announcement is vague from a technical perspective. It is not clear how the event listener works, how the actions work and how they scale. Salesforce will have to shed more light on this – hopefully soon. Moreover any complete IoT strategy needs to offer Hadoop scale data management, storage and analytics usage, something this announcement does not mention. It looks like Salesforce sees its IoT strategy (for now) as connectivity issue, but this is not a long term IoT strategy (though a typical one for application vendors). Instead of bringing IoT data to the enterprise applications, we see it much more that enterprise application data has to come to the IoT data.

Overall a good first step by Salesforce, creating value for existing customers, but much more needs to follow to make Salesforce an IoT contender, and Salesforce App Cloud a veritable IoT platform contender. Maybe something Salesforce does not want to become. We will learn more at Dreamforce, stay tuned.

And if ready for some watching - checkout my video what I would like Salesforce to address this Dreamforce:

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Salesforce Unveils Breakthrough IoT Cloud, Powered by Salesforce Thunder

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