7 things you might have missed at dreamforce

The rush of Dreamforce is over, 4 days of innumerable sessions, hectic parleys and amazing parties if you were one of the person who was exhibiting it will take at least a month to collate the notes.

The announcements of Salesforce partnering with Google and integrating G Suite caught everyone’s attention and so was Salesforce focus on Commerce cloud, but there were quite a few other notable activities that happened at Salesforce that were remarkable but could just go unnoticed.

This year the focus within Dreamforce conference for, Salesforce was personalization. Building on the traction of Lightning Salesforce is slowly expanding the scope of its platforms which would help its customer deploy an easily configurable solution a feature that used to be a big limitation of Saas platforms.

Customization and personalization was a key focus with new versions of platforms being launched which could be easy.

Here is a list of Top 7 things that caught our attention during Dreamforce-

1. Clouderp – With both Kenandy and Rootstock making their presence felt, Cloud-based ERP solution generated quite a bit of conversation at Salesforce, With Salesforce increased focus on Appexchange and the recent historic event of the number of installs crossing the 5 million mark the time is right for solution providers to increase their penetration in this market. Rootstock highlighted how it will be leveraging the new development within AppExchange around areas like intelligent search and personalized recommendations to further enhance its products. Kenandy, on the other hand, was talking about how to integrate Configure Price Quote and ERP. What these two development indicate is how Salesforce is trying to position itself as a platform provider which is not only focused on the CRM stack or PaaS offering.
2. IOT – Charlie Isaacs talk about how IOT is being thought of in the Salesforce context was another highlight. Salesforce IoT platform enables Salesforce its clients to leverage data at M2M scale. Salesforce IoT platform can be used be to trigger actions with predefined real-time rules that can be executed in real-time and this data can be fed into Salesforce systems. Salesforce hopes to leverage this IoT data to predict product support requirement. Though not widely acknowledged Salesforce is certainly not new to IoT, but its perspective on how it looks at IoT is slightly different. Traditional IoT deployments use case have been usually around logistics and manufacturing but because of its customer engagement background for Salesforce IoT transforms this into an approach that parallels and complements their other solution stack.The keynote on IoT highlighted this point of view, with a series of sessions used to build various scenarios.
3. Machine Learning – With Salesforce’s introduction of Einstein, its focus on a platform for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning was obvious, though it did not make any new announcement this year. It is pretty clear that Salesforce will focus on the machine by building platforms that are more autonomous. During Dreamforce myEinstein was launched and has been described as a platform that will enable admins and developers build custom AI apps across the Salesforce platform without any coding.
4. Manufacturing – With the acquisition of ServiceNow, Salesforce has been making inroads into manufacturing and as highlighted earlier with the addition of IoT in its solution offering this will become more mature..
5. Quip – The mobile-based document collaboration tool that was acquired by Salesforce sometime back was one of the last areas of focus from the announcement of Quip Collaboration Platform and Live Apps. This will ensure that the development team Quip has additional features for records within Salesforce which includes, calendars, Kanban boards and other components..
6. Integration – With customer touchpoint increasing exponentially and Salesforce moving into the B2C domain with the acquisition of Demandware integration was a focal point. Informatica’s demonstration of Cloud Data Management Solutions and Salesforce maturing of the connect platform was pretty exciting. These solutions with enable corporations to integrate distributed silos of data and build solutions that capture and analyse this, making the solutions more context-aware, analytical and predictive.
7. Future – a few topics around what future holds for us were discussed. The most notable among them being the fireside chat between Marc Benioff and Ginni Rometty around how our work will evolve. Some of the other forward-looking ideas that we came across was around Future of Sales or how healthcare will evolve.

Without a doubt, there would be so many other awesome highlights of Dreamforce 2017, and we’d love to hear your comment on what your takeaways were!