RECAP OF DREAMFORCE 2017

Salesforce opened dreamforce 2017 with a series of keynotes and an expo on Wednesday 8th November; though this year kept Trailhead for full conference attendees only.

Presentations were, as always, first class with rooms holding 5,000 people each, a few celebrity speakers and some great customer success stories.  Onsite attendance seemed a little smaller than previous years which was probably because Moscone Center has ongoing rebuilding activity and the weather was not good enough for people to gather in outdoor areas.

Salesforce has evolved to be an integrated cloud-based platform:

  • sharing information across Marketing, Sales, Ecommerce (Retail), Finance, and Support applications;
  • the Lightning UI is mobile first enabled so Salesforce applications are now natively multi-technology
  • Einstein Analytics predicts outcomes using artificial intelligence;
  • and the platform is open enough to share data with social and business systems. Quip has some compelling examples like a media company explaining how it lets them interact across teams without losing time writing emails or going to meetings – everything is shared live and worked through the tool.

The keynote presentations each linked to the conference theme that Salesforce is at the center of the fourth generation of the Industrial Revolution bringing analytics and digital transformation together as Cloud Intelligence while the first generation was mechanical and steam starting in the 1760’s, second generation was mass production and electricity starting early in the 20th century and third generation digital revolution with computing starting in the 1950’s.

Each of the major areas had a keynote with some great customer examples including use of the iPad connected to the Salesforce cloud as the core tool for retail assistants linked to marketing promotions, selling tools like color and style selection, order and inventory management and customer service presenting a seamless mix of in-store and on-line experiences.

The combined number of transactions using the Salesforce platform is now more than Amazon and ranked as world’s number one commerce platform. 

All interactions feed into Salesforce Einstein Analytics which also takes in social feeds to provide predictions useful for making additional sales, driving targeted marketing and planning service as well as supporting dashboards and reports.

The platform has also been opened with Heroku interworking with tools like Jira, Python, Ruby and more.

Quip was an interesting acquisition made just before the 2016 Dreamforce conference and now positioned as the communication tool supporting organizational cultural transformation.  It’s now integrated with editing tools, so a document can be marked up with comments, edited, and then shared by Quip users so there is only one version which is kept up to date and has clear records of why it was changed and by whom.

 

 

 

 

Many of SOPRIS technologies’ customers have Salesforce solutions and it’s very relevant to see how it is evolving and what implications this has for network service providers and enterprise.

 

About the Author:

David Stevenson is Head of Strategy at SOPRIS Technologies building solutions for Service Providers and Enterprise as Network, Cloud and Data Center converge around NFV and SDN.  Previously David led Motive (an Austin startup) growing it from a $50M at acquisition by Alcatel-Lucent to over $200M software business in Customer Experience Service Assurance, Device Management and Analytics with a global customer base.

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Copyright © 2022 Sopris Technologies

Offices

USA: 
+1 (844) 333-8200

800 West El Camino Real, Suite 180
Mountain View, California 94040

Mexico:

Avenida Empresarios #135 Piso 7C, Colonia Puerta De Hierro, 45116 Zapopan, Jalisco