Salesforce Dreamforce 2019, the cloud giant's annual customer and partner conference, continues this week in San Francisco, California.
Ahead of the conference, Salesforce continued to ride strong momentum -- rapidly expanding its business beyond core CRM capabilities to include commerce, communities, enablement, productivity and other customer enablers.
Here are the key moves Salesforce ISVs (independent software vendors) and consulting partners should track at Dreamforce:
Salesforce Dreamforce 2019: Day Three News
22. Vertical Market Apps: Vlocity has developed new applications for communications, media and entertainment, energy and utilities, insurance, health and government. They are available on the Salesforce AppExchange.
21. Segmentation & Workload Security: Illumio's workload security software has been enhanced to support ServiceNow's New York, London and Madrid releases.
20. Sales Automation: SalesLoft, which develops a sales engagement platform, is now offering automation rules to take action on the new LinkedIn Sales Navigator Data Validation capability announced last week. Joint customers will be able to better connect with their prospects and customers using the most up-to-date data, SalesLoft says.
19. More Salesforce Dreamforce News: Want to share news, updates or rumors from the show? Please email me the details: [email protected].
Salesforce Dreamforce 2019: Day Two News
18. Sales Automation Part One: Chili Piper, which develops scheduling software for sales teams, has developed an email inbox specifically designed for account executives and account managers, the company says.
17. Sales Automation Part Two: DecisionLink has unveiled ValueCloud for Sales, which assists salespeople with early stage conversations with clients, and/or the development of business cases.
Salesforce Dreamforce 2019: Day One News
16. Voice and Business Automation: Salesforce is plugging voice recognition technology into its platform, enabling partners and customers to build customized Voice Assistants for employees across any role or industry, the company says.
15. Salesforce AWS Partnership: Here again, Salesforce is promoting voice technology while partnering with Amazon Web Services.
14. Single Version of the Truth: A new Customer 360 Truth capability gives Salesforce users a unified view of each customer -- essentially pulling together data from across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. The result is a single, universal Salesforce ID for each customer you're managing, Salesforce says.
13. AI and Sales: Outreach, a sales engagement platform provider, has unveiled new Outreach Amplify machine learning capabilities. The AI (artificial intelligence) capabilities put machine learning to work and make sales reps more productive and their engagement with customers more impactful, Outreach asserts.
12. ERP and Field Service Management: Rootstock Software, a provider of cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, has built an ERP Connector to Salesforce Field Service Lightning. The result: Field service managers that run Rootstock and Salesforce are better connected to financial and business data.
Salesforce Dreamforce 2019: Pre-Conference News
11. Investor Day: The company will provide an overall business update on November 20 during its annual Investor Day. Salesforce executives expected to speak include
- Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO;
- Keith Block, co-CEO;
- Mark Hawkins, President & CFO;
- Tony Prophet, Chief Equality Officer;
- Bret Taylor, President & Chief Product Officer;
- Amy Weaver, President, Legal & General Counsel; and,
- Adam Selipsky, President & CEO, Tableau.
10. Funding IT Consultants: Salesforce Ventures, the cloud CRM giant’s investment arm, launched a $50 million Consultant Trailblazer Fund. The fund will pump venture capital into cloud consulting businesses and digital agencies that want to scale their Salesforce services capabilities.
9. Salesforce and Microsoft: The two technology giants expanded their strategic partnership -- disclosing plans for Salesforce Marketing Cloud to run on Azure. It's the latest sign that Salesforce will focus on platform and SaaS opportunities, while running those workloads on third-party public cloud infrastructure.
8. Salesforce and Apple: The two technology giants announced three developments:
- The Salesforce Mobile App has been completely redesigned. The mobile CRM app now leverages Einstein, Siri shortcuts and Face ID.
- Trailhead GO, a mobile app for Trailhead that's exclusive to iOS and iPadOS. Trailhead is Salesforce’s free online learning platform to skill up for next-generation jobs.
- The new Salesforce Mobile SDK, optimized for Swift and iOS 13.
On a related note, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Salesforce Co-CEO Marc Benioff will have a fireside chat on Tuesday, November 19.
7. Quote to Cash: Simplus, a provider of Salesforce quote-to-cash advisory, implementation and managed services, is opening a London office to better serve customers and partners in the United Kingdom. The move is part of a larger global expansion strategy, the company says.
6. Chatbot - Salesforce AppExchange: SightCall has launched SightCall Video Assistance Chatbot on Salesforce AppExchange. The chatbot uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to resolve customer issues through Einstein Vision, and can escalate a service request to a live visual support session when human assistance is required, the company says.
5. Field Service Management: Salesforce in August confirmed plans to acquire field service management software provider ClickSoftware for $1.35 billion. ClickSoftware, led by former Autotask CEO Mark Cattini, will likely boost Salesforce’s Field Service Lightning platform. We'll be listening for more updates on the strategy.
4. Professional Services Automation (PSA) for Salesforce CRM: Numerous companies offer PSA software that's tightly integrated with Salesforce CRM. Key names to know include Cloud Coach, FinancialForce, Kimble and Krow Software, among others. We'll be watching for potential PSA updates that may directly benefit partners -- particularly IT consulting firms and MSPs.
3. The Future of Channel Sales: In this Salesforce video, Forrester Research Principal Analyst Jay McBain explains the future of channel sales to Salesforce partners. The 2018 video provides food for thought for partners as they converge on this year's conference.
2. IT Service Management (ITSM) for Salesforce: Might we see some surprises from ServiceNow and other ITSM software providers? We're betting yes. Stay tuned.
1. More Salesforce Dreamforce News: Want to share news, updates or rumors from the show? Please email me the details: [email protected].
