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A traditional Hawaiian blessing and song, plus a surprise performance by The Beach Boys kicked off the second afternoon of Dreamforce 2014. But neither took place simply to entertain the audience. Both were intended to highlight the arrival of Salesforce’s newest innovation, detailed by Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff.
In the spirit of Salesforce, Benioff first touched on the tremendous philanthropy accomplished over the years as a result of the company’s 1-1-1 model: donating 1% of time, 1% of equity, and 1% of product.
The result thus far has been 680,000 volunteer hours given, $68 million in grants, and 23,000 nonprofit organizations using Salesforce’s software at no cost. “Nothing is going to make you happier in your life than giving,” said Benioff.
He then welcomed San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and leaders from the San Francisco Unified School District to discuss a Salesforce-supported fund to help the city’s students become the next generation of innovators. “My dream is for all 57,000 of SFUSD school kids to have an opportunity to work for tech companies,” said superintendent Richard Carranza.
Every industry is being disrupted by technology. Everyone and everything is being connected by the mobile and social revolution, plus billions of applications. As a result, a sea of data exists unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
The systems currently in place aren’t capable of recognizing or managing that information. There is a divide, with customers and the connected devices they use on one side, and companies on the other side.
“Our vision is to build the platform that allows you to connect. We know that if you engage deeply, interact, remember those customers, and create 1-to-1 relationships with them, you will have incredible success,” said Benioff.
Salesforce’s new Customer Success Platform bridges the gap by offering fully connected mobile and social tools powered by the cloud. Companies can employ this never-before-seen technology to better connect to their customers through sales, customer service, marketing, communities, apps, and now, analytics.
“There is a huge opportunity for a wave of innovation,” said Benioff. He then announced Wave: The Salesforce Analytics Cloud, “a product for everyone.” It gives business users the ability to explore, collaborate around, and discover new insights and opportunities from the data being generated by billions of devices and trillions of interactions.
As an integrated part of the Customer Success Platform, Analytics Cloud offers a dynamic user interface, indexed search, and parallel processing. It is also fully mobile and is now available for download from the Apple App Store.
Benioff also shared that along with the ability to manage waves of data, companies must be able to build apps faster to keep up with demand. With that, Salesforce Co-Founder Parker Harris arrived on the keynote stage dressed as “Lightning Man.” His big announcement? The next version of the Salesforce1 Platform, Salesforce1 Lightning.
Harris said that he has “superpowers,” also known as the Salesforce developers. But most companies don’t have that kind of access. Lightning allows developers and business users everywhere to build apps at the speed of light in three ways.
First, it gives them what they need, including components, frameworks, and visual tools. Second, users can run those apps within the Salesforce1 Mobile App. Third, Salesforce1 Lightning features a new mobile user interface, soon to also be available on tablets and desktops. Read more about Salesforce1 Lightning here, and watch the highlight reel below:
