First day of annual conference indicates new product areas Salesforce uses the first day of its annual Dreamforce conference to make a number of product announcements, including IoT Cloud, a platform that takes in and analyses data from Web-connected embedded devices, and integrates with customer data from Salesforce apps.
It becomes available in pilot mode in 1H16, but won't see a full launch until later in the year. IoT Cloud relies on a proprietary event-processing engine called Thunder, and can be used by non-technical workers to better understand customer activity and create rules for sending alerts based on device usage.
Salesforce says: "[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. " IBM and Microsoft are among the companies looking to enable similar IoT-driven services.
Meanwhile, Salesforce has updated its cloud-based Wave analytics/BI software (launched last year) to support "actions" (e.g. creating a case, assigning a task) within Wave data dashboards, and tools for creating reports and dashboards with better visualizations. Wave is also being opened up to support 3rd-party apps featuring Wave dashboards. The update follows a leadership change for Wave, and report that Salesforce is thinking of eliminating the product's platform license fee (it would still charge on a per-user basis) to boost enterprise adoption. Wave squares off against products from BI/data visualization vendors Tableau and Qlik, as well as offerings from IT giants such as IBM, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.