Salesforce Continues to Advance Customer 360 Effort to Enable the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Salesforce isn't slowing down, but rather is accelerating its' growth strategy as the Fourth Industrial Revolution move forward.
Salesforce reported its second quarter fiscal 2020 financial results on August 22, with revenue for the quarter coming in at $4.0 billion for a 22 percent year-over-year gain. Looking forward to the third quarter, the company provided guidance for revenue to be in the range of $4.44 to $4.45 billion, representing a 31 percent year-over-year improvement.
“Everybody knows the Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway,” Salesforce Chairman and co-CEO Marc Benioff said during his company's earnings call. “Everyone and everything is getting connected.”
Benioff stated that IDC forecast global spending on digital transformation to reach $1.18 trillion in 2019, which is an increase of nearly 18 percent over last 2018. He added that Salesforce is at the center of digital transformation begins fundamentally digital transformation is all about the customer.
In Benioff's view, every company needs a intelligent, 360 degree view of their customers and they need to personalize customer experience, which is what Salesforce's Customer 360 vision is all about. He added that Customer360 is Salesforce's vision for bringing companies and their customers together and it will be a huge growth engine for his company over the next decade.
Einstein
Part of the evolving Customer 360 platform is the Einstein artificial intelligence capability. Benioff said that Salesforce now does 8.6 billion Einstein predictions. Einstein Voice and Einstein Vision are now also available to every Salesforce app and those AI-powered capabilities represent the future of customer experience, according to Benioff.
Among the most recent innovations is Einstein Analytics for financial services which was announced in May. It provides wealth advisors, managers and retail bankers AI-powered insights to better serve customers and grow their book of business.
Acquisition
Salesforce is also growing thanks to a growing list of acquisition. Salesforce Maps, which provides location-based services that improve productivity for sales and service employees, benefit from the acquisition of MapAnything, which was acquired in April by Salesforce. The biggest recent acquisition is that of business intelligence provider Tableau, which was completed at the beginning of August for $15.7 billion.
“We're incredibly excited about Tableau, it's a great company with a set of great products. and it's got an incredible development community,” Benioff said.
Also in August, Salesforce announced the acquisition of Click Software for $1.35 billion. Benioff said that Click Software's will integrate into salesforce's field service offering.
“Field Service is incredibly strategic to a number of industries such as utilities, telecommunications, equipment manufacturers and we have a very strong product in Field Service Lightning,” he said. “The combination of Field Service Lightning which grew 100 percent year-over-year in the quarter and Click Software is very, very compelling.”
Benioff also provided some insight into how he decided what companies to acquire. He commented that there is a lot of innovation that's happening outside of Salesforce that he gets insight into, thanks to his customers.
“A lot of the ideas that we've created whether it's software we've – e built or companies we've bought it's really been driven by customers,” he said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
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.
