Salesforce had its annual conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from September 19th to September 23rd, attended by about 40,000 attendees in person and more than 100K attending virtually. This blog post discusses enhancements announced into Salesforce products across its portfolio, highlighted below, followed by a deep dive into Salesforce Genie, implications on various stakeholders, and a summary.
Net Zero Marketplace: Salesforce has always been a company that promotes the planet’s greater good. Enterprises are embarking on initiatives that show them as good earth stewards and are rewarded by consumers. The solution leverages Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud to reduce the complexity of an organization’s path to Net Zero with a transparent carbon credit market.
Slack Innovations: Slack Canvas goes beyond a collaboration platform to becoming a central dashboard where appropriate personnel can quickly congregate to work together. Slack Canvas can be used leveraged in a variety of use cases. The enhanced Slack platform can be used in a sales effort, to close a deal quickly, or in a service challenge, to solve a maintenance problem rapidly.
Salesforce and WhatsApp Partnership: WhatsApp has become the de-facto standard of communications in several geographies worldwide. Customers have also become accustomed to the platform being free. WhatsApp is the primary beneficiary of this partnership, with the ability to monetize the platform and gain access to Salesforce enterprise customers.
Salesforce and Amazon Partnership: On the surface, the partnership only highlights the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Sagemaker for custom ML models and Amazon Ads integration. However, it should be noted that the entire Salesforce Hyperforce can run on the AWS infrastructure under the covers. This ability allows Salesforce to expand into new geographies around the world quickly.
Salesforce Genie: A big difference between digital transformation innovators and laggards is how quickly they respond to changing business conditions. This announcement brings unique capabilities to customers with the ability to work and make decisions with real-time data.
The unique differentiators of Salesforce Genie are as follows:
Implications to customers Many innovations announced at Dreamforce’22 should have customers double down on their Salesforce investments. Salesforce Genie gives them unique capabilities to build an agile business. Customers should consider whether investments in Salesforce Genie pay off through the benefits of a real-time dashboard.
Implications to competitors The ability for Salesforce to accelerate innovation and deliver unique capabilities like Salesforce Genie is the multiyear effort to move to a cloud-native platform. Competitors should consider accelerating their cloud native journey by allowing them to provide competitive alternatives to Salesforce.
Implications to investors Customers’ increasing spending on Salesforce Genie and all the adjoining portfolio offerings like Mulesoft, Slack, and Tableau will give Salesforce headroom for revenue growth. Investors should keep an eye on how much additional revenue must be shared with AWS. All partners, most notably Amazon, Google, Meta, and Snowflake, may see the halo effect of revenue gains.
Summary: Strategic investments by Salesforce in CDP and Hyperforce paid off through high-quality product enhancements at Dreamforce’22. The Mulesoft, Tableau, and Slack acquisitions are helping Salesforce fill the gap in providing tools for digital transformation to customers. As customers face increasing challenges due to global economic and geopolitical factors, additional investments into Salesforce may be an answer to weather uncertainties.
Slack Innovations: Slack Canvas goes beyond a collaboration platform to becoming a central dashboard where appropriate personnel can quickly congregate to work together. Slack Canvas can be used leveraged in a variety of use cases. The enhanced Slack platform can be used in a sales effort, to close a deal quickly, or in a service challenge, to solve a maintenance problem rapidly.
Salesforce and WhatsApp Partnership: WhatsApp has become the de-facto standard of communications in several geographies worldwide. Customers have also become accustomed to the platform being free. WhatsApp is the primary beneficiary of this partnership, with the ability to monetize the platform and gain access to Salesforce enterprise customers.
Salesforce and Amazon Partnership: On the surface, the partnership only highlights the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Sagemaker for custom ML models and Amazon Ads integration. However, it should be noted that the entire Salesforce Hyperforce can run on the AWS infrastructure under the covers. This ability allows Salesforce to expand into new geographies around the world quickly.
Salesforce Genie: A big difference between digital transformation innovators and laggards is how quickly they respond to changing business conditions. This announcement brings unique capabilities to customers with the ability to work and make decisions with real-time data.
The unique differentiators of Salesforce Genie are as follows:
- The information provided is real-time: At the conference, there were questions on whether the information was delivered in milliseconds. When making quick decisions and gaining a competitive edge, a standard business user will happily accept the latest information provided at their fingertips in 1-2 seconds compared to having no news.
- Integration and Connectors: The actual value of a real-time platform depends on information ingested and delivered together. The real benefit of a standard data model across the entire Salesforce portfolio is to provide actionable real-time intelligence from all sources through Salesforce Genie.
- Salesforce Hyperforce: The original Salesforce platform was built on first-party infrastructure hosted in Salesforce’s data centers. Salesforce Hyperforce resulted from creating an entirely new model leveraging cloud native technologies consisting of containers and microservices. The Salesforce Hyperforce infrastructure gives Salesforce the ability to deliver a real-time experience reflected in Salesforce Genie.
- Partners: A dashboard cannot deliver differentiated customer value without the ability to bring a varied set of information to the user. To augment Salesforce’s portfolio of services, 18 launch partners give customers a plethora of additional information to make decisions.
- Advertising partners: How quickly a customer can respond to changing conditions determines business outcomes. For example, an upset win by a sports team may increase the demand for airline seats and hotel rooms in specific city pairs and locations. Instantly tweaking the prices of airline seats and hotel rooms can lead to higher revenue. If pricing is changed with launching digital advertising campaigns, the outcome can be much higher profitability than competitors.
- Consumption-based pricing: Without the ability to predict the cost of Genie, a customer may be dissatisfied if the outcomes do not match the spending. Salesforce will have to provide much better transparency on the projected Genie costs for customers. This will help customers make informed decisions on whether to embark on using Genie.
- Integration beyond Salesforce: Salesforce Genie, running on Salesforce Hyperforce, primarily leverages the AWS infrastructure. Connecting to data residing on AWS would be fast and with low costs. However, integrating data residing on other public cloud providers could bring unforeseen cost and latency challenges to a real-time platform.
Implications to customers Many innovations announced at Dreamforce’22 should have customers double down on their Salesforce investments. Salesforce Genie gives them unique capabilities to build an agile business. Customers should consider whether investments in Salesforce Genie pay off through the benefits of a real-time dashboard.
Implications to competitors The ability for Salesforce to accelerate innovation and deliver unique capabilities like Salesforce Genie is the multiyear effort to move to a cloud-native platform. Competitors should consider accelerating their cloud native journey by allowing them to provide competitive alternatives to Salesforce.
Implications to investors Customers’ increasing spending on Salesforce Genie and all the adjoining portfolio offerings like Mulesoft, Slack, and Tableau will give Salesforce headroom for revenue growth. Investors should keep an eye on how much additional revenue must be shared with AWS. All partners, most notably Amazon, Google, Meta, and Snowflake, may see the halo effect of revenue gains.
Summary: Strategic investments by Salesforce in CDP and Hyperforce paid off through high-quality product enhancements at Dreamforce’22. The Mulesoft, Tableau, and Slack acquisitions are helping Salesforce fill the gap in providing tools for digital transformation to customers. As customers face increasing challenges due to global economic and geopolitical factors, additional investments into Salesforce may be an answer to weather uncertainties.