Salesforce has created an IoT Cloud as it looks to take advantage of the growing demand for IoT data connectivity.
Powered by Thunder, the IoT Cloud is a scalable, real-time event processing engine that connects billions of events with Salesforce to unlock insights from the connected world to help empower users to take the right action at the right time.
The company is aiming to accelerate the adoption of the IoT Cloud with initial launch partners that include ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeln that provide connectivity between devices and the Internet.
Thunder, is part of the Salesforce App Cloud, an integrated set of platform services that aims to enable businesses to develop connected apps fast. It offers services for app development, modern user experiences, integration, mobile app development, identity management, compliance, governance and more.
The company said it will be able to connect to IoT data and digital content with customer information, which is intended to help 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.
Business users will be able to use point-and-click tools to define, modify and set rules and logic for events that can trigger actions across Salesforce.
The company said that it will work across the company’s Customer Success Platform, it will surface insights and trigger real-time 1:1, personalised actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process.
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This is the seventh cloud that the company has developed, with the others being the App Cloud, Sales Cloud CRM, Health Cloud, Service Cloud, Analytics Cloud and the Marketing Cloud.
Gary Barnett, chief analyst, Ovum, said: "IoT deployments only bring value when organisations are able to act on the information that their IoT networks generate.
"The ability to make sense of that data by connecting it with existing customer information will be a key factor in turning data into action."
Informatica is also getting involved in this space with new cloud capabilities and offerings that help to power multiple Salesforce initiatives, such as; Internet of Things, analytics connectors and vertical solutions.
As a major ISV partner, Informatica provides pre-built native cloud integration and data management capabilities for Salesforce clouds. This includes Sales Cloud, Service, Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud and App Cloud.
It provides vertical and role-based analytics connectors for the Wave Analytics Platform.
The new capabilities include supporting the IoT Cloud and Analytics App Integration. The company provides a pre-built native connector that will allow Salesforce administrators and IT to move external data into Wave Analytics for business users’ access.
Additionally it also enables the integration of external data sources with the Wave Analytics app.
The company is also offering enhanced data masking for cloud platform users, mission-critical connectivity for vertical apps and several new versions of pre-built connectors for cloud applications and Big Data sources.
This includes; Box, Hadoop, MailChimp, Concur, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
