With The New Salesforce IoT Cloud Service, I See Some Version of Next Best

Recently, Salesforce came up with the new IoT cloud explorer edition that enables sales, marketing, and support personnel to use and maintain IoT devices. Salesforce itself being a large and well-disciplined company which is pretty good at marketing too continues to innovate product ideas from core platform to high-end applications. Coming back to the new cloud service, it is supposed to offer all the relevant information on how customers make use of IoT products that will let companies refine the way they approach services to connected businesses and improve their pitches for new and potential clients for a few industries in particular.

In fact, it may quite interest you to know that the main impetus behind the introduction of IoT Cloud Explorer Edition is to offer workers without technical or coding experience an equal opportunity to manage as well as analyze IoT devices. Moreover, the service even offers graphic-based tools that workers can use to design their routines. And after working for years with a recognized salesforce development company, I can say that it is pretty uncommon for such projects to put technology first.

“Many of the things we have seen with IoT have been code-heavy builds with massive teams of developers who build out the code to make sure you can talk to your connected devices — those are totally separate from your own business process and strategy,”- says Bo Mangels, senior manager, product marketing, IoT and platform at Salesforce.

We See Some Version Of Next Best…

Fast App Development- Salesforce has been paying a good deal of attention to the applications level these days, in addition to spiffing up its platform. Although, it’s quite noticeable in banking and finance as well as IoT, but the differences in approach are what's most interesting. Yes, the company’s IoT approach is very different from what it has been doing in finance. With the help of new IoT explorer, one can develop applications at a faster pace.

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 procedures, I.e. from intelligent devices to connectivity to IoT platforms and finally on to business applications. 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.

Critical Processes- By focusing heavily on the apps, SalesForce appears to be positioning itself as the key to capturing value from investing further in upstream in devices and platforms. Chances are pretty much that a business might make independent decisions about those areas and the company better be able to work with whatever is in place, and that's the strategy.

Looking at the early IoT market, it makes good sense to go with an app development strategy. Yes, having standardized apps that vendors might want to buy off the shelf means having a quick and efficient development toolset makes all the sense in the world.

Whereas on the other side of the industry, there's financial services and banking -- two mature marketplaces with specific application demands. I personally feel that here the strategy is less about new development and more about using the platform to make clean and effective changes to process-oriented operational systems. Here, Salesforce can deploy its many platform-based tools along with partners like nCino and Vlocity, to produce systems that cover an institution's critical processes -- like loan origination and customer service.