This week Salesforce held its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
With more than 171,000 registered attendees and an expected 15 million online viewers, this is a tech conference dialled up to 11.
The CRM cloud company has been on a spending spree throughout the year, another acquisition was announced during the show, and with those purchases comes questions.
CBR highlights the big announcements and topics from the show.
Quip
A tech conference wouldn’t be the same without a few big core technology announcements, and Salesforce didn’t disappoint.
The company unveiled the next generation of its Customer Success Platform.
Firstly the introduction of Quip, from its acquisition of the company with the same name. The company that makes a word process app was acquired by Salesforce at the start of August this year and it has quickly been turned around into a product.
The productivity solution is designed to help teams to collaborate without email. It combines documents, spreadsheets, task lists and team chat to create a “living document.”
Salesforce now allows users to sign-up and log into Quip with their existing Salesforce credentials. The company has also developed a Quip Lightning component to allow teams to access and create Quip documents and spreadsheets straight from Salesforce.
Salesforce Rich Mentions is another feature, this one is designed to let users display Salesforce data and account records as rich mentions in Quip documents.
Salesforce Einstein
Perhaps the most anticipated of the announcements at Dreamforce, Einstein will embed artificial intelligence into the company’s platform.
The company says that this will create the world’s smartest CRM that will empower its users to get closer to customers, automatically discover relevant insights, predict future behaviour and proactively recommend best next actions along with task automation.
Some of the features that Einstein offers include the ability to use the data inside Salesforce. This means that it can access customer data, activity data from Chatter, email, calendar, ecommerce, social data streams such as tweets and images, and IoT signals from participating customers.
The company allows for AI predictive models to be customised automatically for individual customers; these are able to learn, self-tune, and get smarter based on relevant interactions and additional data, the company said.
Lightning Bolt
Lightning Bolt is described as a new framework within the Salesforce Platform that is able to accelerate a company’s ability to “turbocharge the creation of a new community,
next-gen portal or customer-facing website,” all while seamlessly integrating with the CRM in less time than previously required.
The company said that over 10 partners, including the likes of Cognizant, Deloitte, PwC, have already built its solutions for specific communities, portals, and more.
Salesforce has also added some improved productivity featurers with a horizontal navigation bar and redesigned App Launcher to make it easier to toggle between apps and live search.
The hope is that this will help to make Salesforce more intuitive and faster to use.
Thunder IoT Cloud
After lightning comes thunder – and Salesforce has added new IoT profiles and a Traffic Monitor.
On the profile front this is designed to bring together data sources in real-time, such as streaming event data from connected devices, and contextual data from Salesforce.
The company said that when these data sources are combined it helps to create more meaningful customer experiences. The company gives an example of streaming data from a factory floor robot combined with data from the service level agreement, resulting in the robot manufacturer being able to decide whether or not someone is sent to fix it straight away or later.
The IoT Traffic Monitor will act as a real-time dashboard to help businesses to view the state of its connected devices in relation to the customer experience.
Partner program
One of the key strengths of Salesforce is its partner program. Without it the company would probably not be where it is today.
So to keep everyone happy it has added a few technology benefits, enablement programs, marketing support, and learning opportunities at Dreamforce.
The technology benefits that Salesforce has added include Salesforce DX, a developer experience that will allow partners to create apps more quickly. The company has also improved the integrated development environment and there is now seamless GitHub integration.
Security Review FastTrack has been added so that partners can expedite the AppExchange security review process with pre-screening assistance to launch apps while adhering to strict standards.
The frequency and reach of its roadmap reviews with pop-up labs with Salesforce platform architects and quarterly roundtables with gold certified partners and above, has also been created.
