Salesforce can control the lights at your house. This is not the traditional sales/marketing line we use, but we were happy to discover it, thanks to Kevin O’Hara. Over the Labor Day weekend, while his wife had gone off to a bachelorette party, Kevin did what every CRM junkie would do – he popped open a beer, sat on the couch and started tinkering with Salesforce. A proud geek, his main goal was to see how he could integrate Salesforce with his sophisticated home-automation system.

An hour into this experiment, the Salesforce integration was complete. Kevin is a Director at Threshold Consulting and helps companies with Salesforce and Force.com integrations so this wasn’t completely new to him. He connected Saleforce to his automation device, the ISSY99i, thorough RESTful Web service (a system which allows two computer systems to talk to each other). As a result, every time a deal over $100k closes in Salesforce, a flashing red light went off in his house.  Here is the process in its full glory:

 “The reason why I was able to do something like this in less than an hour is because Salesforce is in the cloud and the platform is so easy to work with. If I had to write an application from scratch and put it on a server, it would have taken way longer,” says Kevin.

Hours after he posted a video of his project, he got a call from a client with a large call center. The client wanted to use this Salesforce integration and install a flashing light on every salesperson’s desk – every time somebody closed a big deal in Salesforce, the light would go off.

Thanks to the success of the flashing light integration, Kevin is looking ahead to bigger Salesforce home projects. His plan is to use the Force.com platform to create a control panel for his entire house. That way, he can monitor and control all the automated functions in his residence from anywhere in the world. Can you say...Houseforce? We love it!

Follow Kevin's progress on Twitter: @kevino80