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Salesforce IoT Cloud: Massive Scale For 'Internet Of Customers'

This article is more than 8 years old.

Both Lightning and Thunder jolted the audience out of their seats at this week’s massive Dreamforce conference. But the news wasn’t about the weather. It was all about two major platform announcements by customer relationship management leader Salesforce.com .

Lightning is a collection of components and tools for building better applications with updated, modern user interfaces. Yet, just like its namesake, Lightning provides both flash and power, as Salesforce is gradually rewriting their Salesforce1 platform with Lightning components. Lightning, therefore, will be powering apps from Salesforce, their partners, and their customers for years to come.

Thunder is Salesforce’s name for their new, massively scalable, real-time event processing engine. Thunder is part of the Salesforce App Cloud, an integrated set of platform services that enable businesses to develop connected applications.

Lightning is electrifying customer experience professionals and developers, while Thunder is making the most noise as the backbone to Salesforce’s new IoT Cloud.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot buzzword that refers to the ability to connect a wide variety of devices and sensors to the Internet, from automobiles to light switches to factory equipment to traffic signals. And while IoT Cloud can certainly connect to such devices, the IoT is in fact only part of the IoT Cloud story.

In reality, IoT Cloud connects everything to Salesforce – or at least, anything that can send or receive a digital message. For example, IoT Cloud connects data from websites, social interactions, and applications to Salesforce.

For example, IoT Cloud is an important enabler of Salesforce’s partnership with Microsoft . Office 365, which runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, sends messages over the IoT Cloud to the Salesforce platform. Given the number of Office 365 customers and the number of messages each application instance might send per day, the scale of IoT cloud becomes apparent.

Skype for Business and Outlook 2016 are two other Microsoft applications that integrate with Salesforce, according to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

IoT Cloud will be in pilot the first half of 2016 with general availability later in the year.

The IoT: Actually the ‘Internet of Customers’

Office 365 is only the beginning of the IoT Cloud story. By connecting the billions of real-time events and digital content with Salesforce, IoT Cloud brings the customer context to transactional data.

“Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers,” according to Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. “The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time 1:1, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success.”

Devices or applications generate events, which in turn trigger actions via real-time rules. IoT Cloud then orchestrates these rules across billions of devices. Orchestration is Salesforce’s term for what they do with device data to support the numerous apps and processes that run on the Salesforce platform.

The actions IoT cloud can take include notifying individual users, for example by text message. These actions can also kick off processes in Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Service Cloud, for example. Furthermore, all of these actions take place in real-time, enabling companies to engage with customers proactively and on a one-to-one basis.

Best in Class Technology

Under the covers, IoT Cloud runs on four open source products from The Apache Software Foundation: Spark, Cassandra, Kafka, and Storm.

Apache Spark is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing that enables massive clusters of servers to run in parallel.

Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable fault-tolerant database that is especially well-suited for the cloud.

Apache Kafka is a high-throughput distributed messaging system. A single Kafka broker can handle hundreds of megabytes of reads and writes per second from thousands of clients.

Apache Storm is a distributed real-time computation system. Storm takes streams of data and processes them in arbitrarily complex ways.

Salesforce uses these products not because they’re open source, but because they are the best products on the market for supporting the massive scale requirements for IoT Cloud. In fact, these four technologies are at the core of most web scale companies.

The Salesforce Ecosystem: Committed to Customers, Committed to Scale

In spite of these impressive announcements, technology is in fact only a supporting player in the Salesforce story. Its success in reality depends upon three central pillars: customers (Salesforce’s customers as well as their customers’ customers) and their partner ecosystem, as well as the technology.

Salesforce’s roots are in customer relationship management, and enabling sales and marketing efforts will always be their raison d’être. Without the support of its massive ecosystem of partners, furthermore, Salesforce would not be as large and successful as it is today.

The price of admission for Salesforce, however, will always be the underlying cloud-based technology story. Without massive scale, cutting edge tools, and an open architecture that supports both customers and partners, Salesforce would have hit a ceiling long ago. But as the Lightning and Thunder stories would suggest, the sky is the limit.

Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.

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