OREANDA-NEWS. September 17, 2015.  We are in the midst of a customer-centric revolution. It’s driven by new consumer expectations and it’s changing everything. The third wave of applications, connected services, is enabling mobile phones and other smart devices to meet those expectations -- whether it’s your car helping you schedule a service appointment when its oil is low, or your airline automatically rebooking your preferred replacement flight following a cancellation.

Devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) are at the core of this transformation. They generate massive amounts of data and companies have started to capture and store billions of data events every day. But storing it isn’t enough. This revolution is about proactively engaging computers and people to resolve issues or grab opportunities. Responses must be intelligent, actionable, personal, and in real-time.

Most companies today aren’t enabled in this way. Most of their customer engagements aren’t personal, let alone proactive. With this in mind, we at Salesforce sat down and asked ourselves how we could help our customers use the Internet of Things to connect and respond to their customers in a whole new way. We also thought hard about what this would look like and who we needed to enable.

Our focus is delivering tools to help our customers do anything. And not just the serious developers. We want to empower every business user and analyst to solve big problems around big data too. We recognize that what our customers need is an application that is truly intelligent, caring, and proactive, because that is what their customers want. This is true for every industry and every size of company.

That is why we built Salesforce IoT Cloud. It’s powered by Thunder, a massively scalable, real-time processing engine. This technology makes it possible to do three really big things: listen to the world at IoT scale, trigger actions with real-time rules, and use the power of Salesforce to proactively engage.

1. Listen to the world at IoT Scale


With Salesforce IoT Cloud, you can capture events and the resulting data around any and every personal interaction at scale, from web site engagement and device usage, to email histories and mobile events or location, to IoT signals. You can filter this data on the way in, filter out the stuff you don’t want, and then assemble it in a way that can be referenced with no limits. This gives you as a business user a very rich 360-degree profile of your customer or device.

2. Trigger actions with real-time rules


Once you’ve captured relevant data, you can write and adjust an unlimited set of smart and extensible rules around it, with the rich 360-degree customer profiles as context. We let you add intelligence. This means every time data changes, or a new event comes in, or you simply want to engage with a customer when a certain amount of time has passed, you can describe how you want to respond and trigger the appropriate action or actions.

3. Respond proactively and 1:1


In response to various events, you can then leverage the full power of Salesforce to engage proactively with your customers and employees 1:1, wherever they are. For example, you can create a case with Service Cloud. You can trigger a workflow in Sales Cloud. You can send an SMS or email or message through Line or WeChat with Marketing Cloud or through Chatter to an employee. You can tell an Heroku program in App Cloud to wake up. You can post a recommendation with Community Cloud. This is how our customers give their customers the level of engagement they now expect.