Salesforce Inc. kicked off the Dreamforce conference this week, bringing 40,000 members of its extensive community together in San Francisco for the first time in over two years, announcing new services that will allow them to connect with each other in new ways long after the event. did. ends Thursday.
Built around the theme of a “great reunion” after a global pandemic restricted in-person events, the Dreamforce event will feature the release of a real-time data platform called Salesforce Genie that powers the company’s customer relationship management product. did.
The company also launched new collaboration features for Slack, which was acquired by the CRM giant last year. This week’s announcement recognizes that the pandemic has profoundly changed the world of business, and Salesforce is responding to this new reality by enhancing its tools for customer engagement.
The company also launched new collaboration features for Slack, which was acquired by the CRM giant last year. This week’s announcement recognizes that the pandemic has profoundly changed the world of business, and Salesforce is responding to this new reality by enhancing its tools for customer engagement.“We have a lot going on, but we have to recognize that a lot has happened,” says co-founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff (pictured, right). said in today’s keynote address. “We have to have a beginner’s mind. What do we really want and what really matters to us? We want to connect with our customers in a whole new way.”
Major platform migration
Salesforce’s new way to connect with customers through Genie was characterized by Benioff co-CEO Bret Taylor (left) as “the most significant change in our platform in 20 years.” A real-time data approach is designed to meet expectations for highly personalized engagement that incorporates meaningful data at warp speed.
Taylor said in today’s keynote: “Personalization now needs to happen in milliseconds. We’ve completely reimagined CRM.”
The company’s announcement this week reflects Salesforce’s interest in maximizing the value of its major acquisitions over the past few years. Genie includes connectors for Salesforce’s MuleSoft integration platform, which he purchased in 2018, and Tableau data virtualization products, which he acquired in 2019.
Salesforce’s latest additions to the Slack messaging platform include a new Canvas tool that allows users to store information within a channel’s workspace and link it to their workflows. Canvas is built on technology from Quip, a startup co-founded by Taylor that Salesforce acquired him in 2016.
“It’s like Quip graduating from high school and going to college,” Taylor said in the post-keynote media session.
largest in enterprise apps
The Dreamforce event comes a month after Salesforce beat its quarterly expectations, but its forecasts for fiscal 2023 were disappointing. Still, during his keynote, he didn’t prevent Benioff from mentioning that Salesforce recently overtook his CRM competitor, SAP, in the enterprise application business.
“I have high marks for SAP,” says Benioff. “They had a great quarter. They had a better quarter. This means Salesforce is the largest enterprise applications company in the world.”
Salesforce’s warning about the upcoming fiscal year reflects the company’s executives’ perception that the sales cycle is stretching and that new deals are under more scrutiny. said the current post-pandemic economy is taking a journey into uncharted waters.
“Obviously what we went through in the last two years was completely different,” Benioff said during a media session. “It’s a new day from where we were two years ago to where we are today. The buying environment is strong and the company is more relevant than ever.”
We got to see one of Salesforce’s new looks in the first hour of the keynote itself. Unlike years past when Benioff walked into his Dreamforce conference hall alone, Taylor joined on Tuesday.
The joint keynotes reflect the culmination of Taylor’s rapidly advancing career, co-creating Google Maps, her first job out of college as Group Product Manager from 2003-2007. Taylor said the media has acknowledged the impact Benioff has had on his tech career.
“When I started Quip, my first call was with Marc because I had never sold enterprise software before,” says Taylor. “Mark is my mentor and my friend.”