Salesforce is enhancing its business offerings with IoT connectivity and data science analytics.
The company has unveiled SalesforceIQ for businesses, designed to improve the sales process and powered by ‘Relational Intelligence technology’. This uses data science to analyse company relationships with prospects, customers and partners.
Relationship Intelligence will be capable of automatically capturing, analysing and surfacing information from emails and calendars.
The idea behind this is to help businesses to use data-driven insight in order to improve customer relationships.
SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud has also been introduced. This is an app for iOS, Android and Chrome which will allow representatives to sell direct from the inbox. Additionally it will suggest tasks and read receipts.
The components include the new Lightning Experience, which provides relevant information on desktop, tablet and mobile.
Salesforce Lightning also includes the new Lightning Design System, this allows Salesforce developers to build components that work with Salesforce on every device and operating system.
It also includes Lightning App Builder that provides developers with an intuitive way to build apps using a drag and drop visual interface of Lightning Components.
The San Francisco based cloud company is also looking to take advantage of the growing IoT market. Its IoT Cloud, which will be powered by Thunder, is a scalable and real-time event processing engine.
Part of its App Cloud, Thunder, is built on an architecture that makes it capable of listening to the connected world. The IoT Cloud will connect to billions of events within Salesforce and help to reveal the right action to take at the right time.
Businesses will be able to connect to IoT data and digital content with customer information, this will help to give more context and meaning to data. Phones, wearables, windmills and industrial turbines are just some of the things that can be connected to the IoT Cloud.
The goal is to help facilitate the personalisation of actions for sales, service, marketing and other business processes.
Marc Benioff, chairman, Salesforce, said: "Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers.
"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."
The company has been making a significant push in connecting more data with its solutions. It recently enhanced its App Cloud so that apps could be better connected.
One of the challenges associated with growing the amount of data that can be connected to apps, comes from data integration.
Regarding its App Cloud developments, Jim Sinai, Sr. Direction, AppExchange & Platform Marketing, Salesforce, told CBR: "We’ve done work to integrate data in the back with rich API’s for any data field – any data."
