The uniqueness of 2020 was made complete with Salesforce’s annual conference pivoting from its usual 180,000 visitors at Moscone to an online video broadcast, live from Salesforce Park next to Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.
But no reshaping of the event could be as dramatic as some of the announcements, which were more seismic than the last few years combined.
The Purchase of Slack
At 27 Billion dollars, Slack represents a little over 10% of Salesforce’s Market Capitalization and demonstrates Salesforce’s continuing appetite to make big bets on the technologies it believes are key. I’ve worked with the team at Accenture to publish a point of view on Slack, and you’ll find it on LinkedIn soon.
Hyperforce
The workloads Salesforce is taking on in its core platform are getting more significant in both their scale and sensitivity every day, and the fundamental platform of Salesforce has been relatively unchanged over its 21 years of the companies operation. But Hyperforce changes that. For the first time, public cloud infrastructure and the Hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) take a front set. As a leading partner to all of these platforms, Accenture is delighted to see Salesforce breakout of its data centres and bring its platform to jurisdictions and to scaling opportunities greater than ever before. Precise technical details are coming, but from the announcement, this could be a fundamental shift for many operators of sensitive and complex workloads!.
Einstein Automate
Einstein Automate’s is an umbrella term for several different technology features in Salesforce. The most fundamental of these are:
Mulesoft Composer
Mulesoft is an immensely capable integration platform, but it has existed at two extremes, the basic Dataloader.io service, for cloud-based data loading, and the enterprise-grade Anypoint Platform for doing serious integration work. Mulesoft Composer fills in the gap in between, putting integration technology into the hands of the point and click developer or admin, and dramatically increasing the opportunities to deploy Mulesoft technology in a range of situations. Mulesoft can now offer integration solutions across the Enterprise, and an essential step in consolidating your integration demands to a single vendor.
Flow Orchestrator
First workflow Rules, then Process Builder, then the reworked Flow Builder, and now, the next evolution of Automation control on the platform Flow Orchestrator. Whilst not yet a formal BPM Solution, the ability to describe more complex and sophisticated automation and infuse it with AI through clicks means Salesforce is leaping ahead in its leadership of low code platforms.
OmniStudio
The acquisition of Vlocity is starting to appear in the Salesforce core products, most notably with the new Public Sector Solutions capability. For those unfamiliar with Vlocity its the core of the Salesforce Industry Cloud’s, with specialised data models and feature sets for a multitude of industries and several key platform capabilities, such as OmniScript, for creating dynamic customer interactions without code (Beyond Salesforce’ native Page Layout and Screen Flows). Like Flow Orchestrator, this is a dramatic expansion of Low Code capabilities. Accenture has been an early adopter of Vlocity for many years, and we’re excited to see this acquisition bare fruit.
Beyond these core announcements, there were improvements to Service Cloud with its Intelligent Dynamic Forecasting of Service Cloud workloads, the Omni Channel Capacity planning to help customers understand staffing needs and Personalized Agent Engagement for real-time coaching.
In Conclusion
It was clear that the journey that started in 2016 with the announcement of Salesforce Einstein is now in full roar with almost every product or feature looking to deliver smarts as well as function. All of this signals a relentless focus on the use of technology to deliver business value, social value and to lead customers through change.