Cloud software company Salesforce today is announcing the release of IoT Cloud, a new service that will put the company into a new market. Think of IoT Cloud as a tool that non-technical workers can use to automatically kick off specific actions based on data from Internet-connected devices, social media messages, websites, and other sources.
IoT Cloud can integrate with Salesforce’s existing services, like the Marketing Cloud and the Service Cloud. Just as IoT can integrate with other entities in the Salesforce portfolio. Salesforce recently announced that it’s more tightly integrating the Analytics Cloud with other parts of Salesforce, such as the widely used Sales Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) software.
The broad theme, of course, is that Salesforce is continuing to diversify its offerings and reduce its dependency on the CRM category. That’s why the launch of IoT Cloud is arguably the biggest news to come out of Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. At Dreamforce last year, Salesforce officially unveiled Analytics Cloud, which was a diversifying product itself. Prior to that, there were acquisitions in the marketing category — Buddy Media and ExactTarget — and before that, Salesforce picked up platform as a service (PaaS) cloud capability by buying Heroku. In this case, Salesforce didn’t buy a company to get the new functionality. IoT Cloud is based on Thunder, an event-processing engine developed at Salesforce, according to a statement.
The software stands out on the basis of not requiring technical expertise. Engineers can write programs that draw on data stored in Hadoop and other repositories, but Salesforce is making this tooling more accessible. Salesforce is partnering with ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC’s ThingWorx, and Xively by LogMeIn for the launch of IoT Cloud.
Source: Venturebeat.com
