Salesforce Announces New Products and Extended Partnerships at Dreamforce 2018

Sean Michael

Updated · Oct 08, 2018

Trust, innovation and AI, equality and sustainability, personal empowerment and mindfulness — those are the key themes that Marc Benioff, founder and co-CEO of Salesforce said defined the 2018 Dreamforce event which ran from Sept. 25 – 28 in San Francisco.

Dreamforce is Saleforce's premier customer event, with 171,000 registered attendees onsite in San Francisco and another 10 million viewers expected to watch different sessions online. In total, the event had over 2,700 sessions, highlighted by an opening day keynote from Benioff.

“We're moving into the fourth Industrial Revolution, and it's amazing,” Benioff said.

Benioff said that the first industrial revolution was led by steam power, the second by electricity, the third by computers. The fourth Industrial Revolution is all about pervasive connectivity.

“Everything is starting to get connected,” he said.

Products and Partnerships

Among the news announced by Salesforce at Dreamforce was the new Customer 360 service, which aims to connect multiple Salesforce tools together to create a new unified view of customers.

The Customer 360 dashboard is set up to be a point-and-click experience for data management across different Salesforce apps. The new tool will also enable a single customer ID, which allows organization to more easily manage and measure customer experience.

“As consumers, we know when a brand has gone the extra mile to deliver an amazing cross-channel experience, but creating that single view of the customer is extremely challenging for any company to do consistently,” Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, stated. “Customer 360 will make it easier for companies to bring service, commerce and marketing together to deliver the unified experiences that their customers demand — with clicks, not code.”

Sales Cloud

Salesforce got its start with customer relationship management (CRM) software-as-a-service that was largely used by sales teams. Salesforce has not forgotten its roots, and at Dreamforce announced new capabilities for its Sales Cloud platform.

Among the new features that are now in Sales Cloud is a new Sales Cadence feature, which integrates best practices to help detail a pre-built activity sequence for sales team activities. Another new feature is Work Queues, which integrates with Sales Cadence, as well as the Einstein artificial intelligence lead scoring engine.

“Automation, integration and speed are essential to business success in the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Adam Blitzer, EVP and GM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, wrote in a statement. “By extending our Sales Cloud platform with faster prospecting, flexible billing and intelligent marketing automation, we’re providing our customers with a comprehensive and unparalleled lead-to-cash platform.”

AWS Partnership

Salesforce also used Dreamforce as the time to announce an expanded strategic alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Because of the deep relationship between AWS and Salesforce — Salesforce runs the vast majority of their public cloud workloads in AWS, and Amazon relies upon Salesforce across various businesses to enhance customer relationships — we have a unique ability to integrate our services and provide customers with enhanced solutions,” Matt Garman, vice president, AWS Compute Services, stated. “These new integrations will enable companies to leverage the full power of both platforms, driving innovation and building intelligent, connected customer experiences.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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  • Sean Michael
    Sean Michael

    Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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