IoT Explorer

  • October 19, 2017
  • Salesforce is a large and well-disciplined development company. They’re pretty good at marketing too. They continue to innovate in all product areas from core platform to applications and the one criticism I’d make is that it’s information overload at times. Reminds me of Oracle.

    Lately they’ve made a big deal of adding their AI product, Einstein, to every application area to provide insights and stack rank options. Given that this is the first year of Einstein, it’s not surprising that the foundational layer looks similar across all of Salesforce’s disciplines; in cloud after cloud we some version of next best… . I expect that we might see examples of this at Dreamforce.

    But back to discipline. Salesforce is paying a good deal of attention to the applications level these days in addition to spiffing up its platform and it’s noticeable in banking and finance as well as in the IoT but the differences in approach are what’s most interesting.

    In IoT, the company is taking a very different approach than in finance. The company recently announced IoT Explorer and the ability to develop IoT applications quickly. App building tools are a part of the platform so it’s not much of a surprise that more agile development is coming to IoT though it reveals an interesting take on company strategy.

    IoT has a lot of moving parts right now and the natural inclination for some might be to try to dominate the end to end process from intelligent devices to connectivity to IoT platforms and finally on to business applications. But three of these four areas might easily not bring in a nickel for a company like Salesforce. Specialized vendors that Salesforce would have trouble competing with dominate devices and connectivity. IoT platforms is a similar area with companies like Amazon Web Services dominating. So Salesforce wisely didn’t try to compete and is dedicated to supporting the leading platforms leaving the business application area as its chosen place to compete.

    By focusing on the apps, Salesforce is positioning itself as the key to capturing value from investments further up stream in devices and platforms. Typically a business might make independent decisions about those areas and the business app company better be able to work with whatever is in place and that’s the strategy.

    Given the state of the early IoT market, it makes good sense to go with an app development strategy. It’s too early to have standardized apps that vendors might want to buy off the shelf so having a quick and efficient development tool set makes all the sense in the world.

    On the other side of the industry there’s financial services and banking, two mature marketplaces with specific application demands and here the strategy is less about new development than it is about using the platform to make clean and effective changes to process oriented operational systems. So in banking and finance Salesforce can deploy its many platform based tools as well as partners like nCino and Vlocity to produce systems that cover the institution’s critical processes, like loan origination and customer service. Again, Dreamforce might have more to reveal here.

    Published: 6 years ago