Salesforce Unwraps Salesforce IoT Cloud at Dreamforce

At Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco today, the CRM firm has unveiled Salesforce IoT Cloud powered by Salesforce Thunder.

The solution is said to be a massively scalable, real-time event processing engine that 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.

Proactive actions

Marc Benioff, Salesforce chairman and CEO, 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 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.

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 $11.1trn per year by 2025. However, businesses have been unable to capitalise on the vast volume of data from the IoT.

Todd Finders, CIO of Emerson Climate Technologies, said: “Emerson is reinventing customer service. “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, personalised way.”

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.”

How much do you know about IoT? Take our quiz!