Dreamforce 2016 Recap

This year, I had the incredible opportunity to attend Dreamforce 2016 (many thanks to Marc Benioff)

Previously, I put together a list of lingering questions around Dreamforce 2016 and the various announcements circulating around Salesforce Einstein, and the Quip and Demandware acquisitions, respectively. I'd like to respond to these questions with insights I learned from the conference as well as my outlook for the future. Overall, I came away impressed with the incredible investments Salesforce has made not with any one solution but in the platform as a whole.

• Salesforce Einstein: What is it? Why does it matter?

First, I would be remiss to not talk about Salesforce's word of the year: Einstein.

Einstein is "formally" introduced at Dreamforce 2016

Einstein is Salesforce's grand vision of an applied big data platform underlying all of its solutions. It is the culmination of Salesforce's strategic acquisitions, hiring of exceptional talent, and product development in machine learning and AI into a tangible product offering that sits beneath all clouds. In a sentence: a foundational layer of intelligence being baked into all of Salesforce's products. Salesforce showcased this layer of intelligence in almost every keynote and session. What I like about Salesforce's approach is that it takes the hype of big-data, analytics, machine learning and AI, and provides functional, specific use cases for Einstein's application.

Einstein will be foundational to the Salesforce platform

Indeed, just as the applications for data science are numerous, the applications for Einstein should be plentiful. Salesforce's focus towards realistic, tailored use cases may also help differentiate and accentuate the overall platform, with insights generated from Einstein having great potential to improve a particular business process. Compare this to other machine learning and AI products and it's easy to get excited about a platform that learns about your data and intelligently recommends your next step related to:

• The best prospects to communicate with, via predictive scoring
• The right content at the right time, to send to a customer
• A specific up-sell or cross-sell opportunity for a customer
• The best time to start and send out marketing emails
• A way to improve margin on a product line

Einstein is the culmination of Salesforce talent and acquisitions

 All in all, it's easy to get excited about Einstein and Salesforce's vision for the future. It is important however to put this in context.  Remember Salesforce Lightning? Announced 2 years ago, the actual roll-out and implementation has been more conservative and controlled than the marketing hype would have suggested. Similarly, I believe what Salesforce showed at the conference is a few years away - and this is no knock on Salesforce. Why?

• Salesforce recently acquired several ML acquisitions that make Einstein possible, this year
• Baking artificial intelligence into the platform will take time
• Examples Salesforce showed were clearly prepared demonstrations or POCs
• Machine Learning and AI in practice are still relatively new commodities
• Salesforce is attempting to make data science a functional solution at scale

Other interesting notes: 

• Einstein will work best when you utilize Salesforce ecosystem products such as Salesforce IQ, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud (consistent schema, data model and data galore)
• In the roadmap is the ability to access Einstein programmatically
• In some cases, you'll be able to see the R code underlying the predictive analysis

Finally, some things we can glean without Salesforce telling us:

• Einstein will be highly dependent on your data:
• Cleanliness
• Timeliness
• Validity
• Einstein isn't looking to replace your data scientist
• Functional insights to business users, without a "$300K investment"
• Einstein will come with a cost(!)
• No pricing was announced, but let's read between the lines
• When ready, Einstein will be a solution that will be available to fully invested customers at a high but likely reasonable price
• They will have competition
• Microsoft's Office 365 and Dynamics 365 Offerings have announced similar capabilities

Overall, Einstein is an exciting offering. For those evaluating or leveraging Salesforce, it's exciting to see such a grandiose vision of bringing "data-science" to everyone. Once Einstein is GA, adoption will be an interesting story for Enterprise and SMB customers.

Let's transition to other insights from the conference. I'll provide the questions in bold, then my answers (read: opinions) immediately following. Overall, this was an amazing conference and there is again, a lot to be excited about from a Salesforce perspective.

• What’s the state of the Lightning Experience?

Salesforce Lightning experience

Lightning Man at Dreamforce 2015

The "lightning experience" definitely appears to be gaining traction and adoption across Salesforce's customer base. Salesforce appears very focused towards bringing this experience to all "clouds" and app experiences within its large ecosystem. However, this appears to be a continued work in progress. Several demonstrations and speaker sessions I attended touted the experience as either new or coming soon to applications. "Lightning ready" was another moniker used by several ISVs and partners within the AppExchange. Overall, I'm excited to see what this means for the user experience and performance improvements as the platform and applications of it continue to mature. Notable omission: Lightning man (pictured above).

• What will the Quip acquisition mean for customer productivity?

• What's Salesforce's vision?
• What will it mean for Microsoft partnership (Office 365/Power BI)

Perhaps one of the most interesting acquisitions, especially considering Salesforce's G-Suite (formerly Google for Work) and Microsoft (Office 365/Power BI) partnerships, CEO Bret Taylor presented a captivating story of productivity and mobility with the Quip platform. In short, Quip aims to reduce clunky email communication and collaboration - and replace it with something more modern. Quip reminds me of a combination of some of the leading productivity platforms today:

• Slack, for communication
• Google Documents, for collaboration
• OneNote/Evernote for task and note taking

This unique combination of capabilities is bolstered by Quip's 2 visions: Collaboration for Teams, and Mobile First, Cloud First productivity. The second, brings pause - this has been Microsoft's mantra for some time. In practice, I believe this is an application that a "mobile first, cloud first" Microsoft should have tried to acquire. It brings productivity solidly into our mobile first world. You can give it a try here.

Quip combines the best of productivity suites into a modern application

I utilized the platform to take session notes throughout the conference and was greatly impressed with the rich feature set and vision for the platform. The ability to link to Salesforce records and collaborate in real time over documents and files, as well as track and communicate regarding the business information and decisions within them is a unique value proposition. The addition of Einstein for increased AI offers infinite possibilities in regards to smarter collaboration. One has to wonder about the Office 365 and G-Suite collaborations Salesforce has announced. My point of view: The customer wins - now three incredible productivity suites to leverage: G-Suite, Office 365 and Quip. Let's just hope it doesn't get renamed to "Productivity Cloud."

• What's the plan with Demandware?

• Demandware has a strong, recognizable customer base with a strong product and brand recognition
• "Commerce Cloud" has an exciting ring to it
• Ability to provide a consistent, integrated CX from lead to customer, click to shopping cart can be realized

Salesforce paid $2.8B to acquire Demandware this year.

Demandware, now affectionately known as Commerce Cloud, had a solid keynote address. This was another monster acquisition for Salesforce, expanding its capabilities past traditional CRM in a logical yet aggressive fashion. The acquisition instantly makes Salesforce a key player in a crowded eCommerce market, with a strong customer base of well known clients such as Adidas, Puma, New Balance, Panasonic and Callaway.

Indeed, the eCommerce market is forecast to grow 9.8 % in 2017, with an annual growth rate (CAGR 2016-2021) of 8.5 % according to Statista. Newly named Commerce Cloud CEO Jeff Barnett presented the next vision of customer success, a vision that highlighted not only the former Demandware's strong brand, but recognizable customer base. Additionally he presented a new POS solution and Einstein capabilities where machine learning is baked native into the platform. 

 Commerce Cloud joins the ecosystem

The vision is a eCommerce solution that can intelligently help your organization recorgnize and connect with a customer regardless of the specific channel. Furthermore AI and ML allow the platform to not only provide predictive recommendations and cross selling opportunities to authenticated users or "customers" but also new visitors to the site based on the few items they may click on while first browsing to the site. This kind of machine learning and intelligent shopping experience should be exciting for current eCommerce customers utilizing a 3rd party app on AppExchange or customers interested in eCommerce. For existing Commerce Cloud customers, they now have the worlds #1 customer success platform underlying their current DemandWare investments. I like the play by salesforce to put themselves in the sights of many digital transformation efforts. 

• What's the plan for Wave?

• BeyondCore may bolster these efforts significantly (see Jen Underwood's excellent post for a detailed introduction)
• Wave is maturing to become a more extensive enterprise reporting asset
• Analytics Cloud Einstein will help the paltform become "smarter"
• Wave Analytics Product Management has incorporated customer feedback into roadmap

Wave Analytics has been Salesforce's play in the analytics space. I heard a lot of customers who have looked at the platform and ultimately passed, or who sprung for the platform and have not got the ROI they would have liked. Ultimately, Salesforce has listened to both types of customer feedback and seems to have buckled down on its analytics offering. 

Not to be confused with Einstein, Wave Analytics is salesforce's visualization platform for Salesforce data. While an effort was made to describe customers who are using the platform to visualize other types of data as well as salesforce data, the platform is clearly built for salesforce data first and other data second. Several improvements are planned to make the experience better:

• More connectors 
• Greater integration capabilities through third party ETL vendors 
• Easier ability to create visualizations without writing JSON
• Enhanced formula editor
• Improved query engine



BeyondCore's lofty ambitions

• Greater ability to easily cleanse and touch up data before analysis
• O-Data support
• Built in what if analysis
• Support for advanced analytics scenarios
• Clustering
• Grouping
• Suggested visualizations
• 1 click trending
• Linear Regression
• Table enhancements
• Formatting
• Configuration
• Enterprise enhancements
• Sharing
• Encryption at rest
• UDF support
• Templating
• Better mobile experience
• Report authoring improvements (similar to Power BI, Tableau's Vizable or Domo)
• Set KPI on phone
• Einstein predictive intelligence infusions

Wave Analytics leveraging Einstein capabilities. Wave road-map items include intelligent insights surfaced by Einstein

All in all, if you currently leverage Wave Analytics you should be excited about the future direction of the product and the enhancements they are making.

• How fast are new, not legacy product offerings being leveraged?

• Health Cloud, IoT and Financial Services Cloud appear to be evolving from marketing, demos and hype to real, supported products
• Health Cloud seemed very impressive
• IoT Cloud, part of an emerging IoT market is still in its infancy

Health Cloud

With IoT and Healthcare IT being industries projected to become $1.7T and $228B markets in 2020 respectively, it's no surprise Salesforce has made a concerted effort to illustrate clients and partners who are leveraging their platform. 

If you recall, Health Cloud was one of Salesforce's first industry offerings, announced just last year and launching this past February at the annual HIMSS Conference. With that in mind, Salesforce obviously did not provide adoption numbers but did a nice job highlighting clients who were leveraging its solutions for clients. Big names such as AstraZeneca and Novartis were highlighted as happy customers while use cases were described for medical device companies, big pharma and healthcare providers. Health Cloud was also touted as a solution for a long-term care facility, Silverado. There's now a concept of care-templates, a sort of importable patient journey you can apply to patients with specified conditions.  Then, there are proven industry partners such as Huron and Deloitte Digital who are trusted to utilize the platform and their deep industry knowledge to craft new digital experiences for its clients. Overall, Salesforce's strategy for Health Cloud looks promising.

Health Cloud will bring additional features such as timeline and care planning

One question that feels a little unclear to me is how useful the solutions would be to clinics, smaller bed and or critical access hospitals. While these customers may need fewer licenses, they might stand to benefit significantly from a solution like health cloud because the care templates could greatly increase efficiency and efficacy of a care planning and implementation. 

Typically, chronic care conditions account for a disproportionate amount of health care costs and utilizing a care template could help a team provide intimate care, using a modern, digital platform to streamline the processes and communication. A bigger hospital could obviously provide more resources to these efforts but also more roadblocks in terms of people, process and technology. Just as the SMB market stands to implement and utilize cloud offerings sooner, I wonder if health cloud would benefit from a marketing strategy focused at hospitals that might be able to implement more quickly.

An interesting implementation of health cloud that I alluded to earlier was in regards to Silverado. Salesforce was not shy touting their implementation. Silverado provides memory care services coupled with palliative care and hospice. Using Health Cloud in conjunction with Salesforce Communities as a patient portal, they could provide a customized experience for patients and their families. An example touted the family's ability to not only manage and take action on care related activities but also monitor and stay in touch with patients, their care and even ADLs at the facility.

Overall, Silverado showcased 4 competitive factors that will continue to shape healthcare experiences as the HIT market matures and healthcare facilities continue to be influenced by digital transformation:

• Population boom
• Competition: small/big/niche
• Technology
• Data explosion

How can Health Cloud, and really, CRM influence and accentuate relationships in healthcare? Simply put, "digital" can help provide 1:1 experiences at scale:

• Better on-boarding
• Personalized messaging
• Newsletters
• Social
• Website experience
• Chat
• Feedback loop for doctors, nurses
• Personalization at scale
• Data management

The steps Salesforce is making with Health Cloud are promising. When features launch next year, it will be interesting to see what the adoption story looks like.

IoT Cloud

In regards to IoT, Salesforce took an approach that again highlighted examples and use cases. Another solution released this year, Salesforce is still working to tout its abilities and use cases. Sessions focused not only on a few examples but also creating and utilizing the solution (Very impressed with these sessions and the giveaways). Overall as this market was burgeoning and still evolving, I felt like these examples were less compelling. A big issue right now is till the security and standards with respect to IoT. I don't feel as if Salesforce has particularly separated themselves here (yet) - but neither has the industry.

With every cloud vendor diving into IoT it will be important for Salesforce to distinguish itself within the IoT market

One impressive feature though is the visual process builder for IoT. The functional visual nature of the designer for IoT input flows and associated actions is visually appealing. As the market continues to grow I think Salesforce overall has a leg up with customers that will be able to mature and adopt the solution as they develop unique use cases for IoT.

• What is Salesforce doing with GravityTank, an innovation consultancy it acquired out of Chicago this year?

• (Hint/Speculation here)

Salesforce and GravityTank logos

Salesforce was mum about this acquisition. My POV: the easy, high level answer is that the research, thought leadership and IP that they have acquired will help them with strategy, planning and integration of other assets as will as building new features into the Salesforce platform.

• How are major platform ISVs and Partners shifting focus as Salesforce's identity and vision changes?
• Salesforce paid $360 million for the configure-price-quote (CPQ) and quote-to-cash solution SteelBrick, a move seen as a surprise for many ISVs
• Other ISVs will need to adapt and find niche within new product offerings
• Solution Integrators will need to quickly get up to speed on new services

Salesforce Quote to Cash, formerly SteelBrick

Salesforce has indeed cannibalized a few ISVs and, Solution Integrators (partners) have seen conglomeration: think IBM Bluewolf, Cloud Sherpas to Accenture. Salesforce did pick up SteelBrick and they certainly won't be the last App to become a first party offering. When you look at SteelBrick and the the CPQ capabilites coupled with the Commerce Cloud positioning, you see a concerted effort towards offering a complete Enterprise Cloud. This is important in not only the race to a $10B rev-run rate but also in terms of competition with the Oracles, Microsofts, SAPs and even the Google and AWS solutions of the world. See Oracle and NetSuite, Google and Apigee, or Microsoft and LinkedIn's wedding for proof.

As Salesforce continues to make big investments in terms of its vision as a Enterprise cloud ecosystem, customers continue to be high on the solution. Capabilities and competencies continue to increase, commensurate with customer requirements, regulations and consumer expectations in a mobile first, cloud first world. Competitors continue to make investments to counteract and compete against this activity. Partners need to stay abreast of these competencies yet differentiate themselves with innovative solutions that offer a strong value proposition.

What does all this mean? Overall, the market for ISVs and partners is as strong as ever. Competition and some cannibalization is completely necessary as both the Salesforce platform and surrounding ecosystem mature.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see what next year's conference yields. My guess? Salesforce will be taking a good look at Kenandy and FinancialForce solutions as Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite closes and Microsoft's Dynamics 365 solution garners publicity and customers.