How does Salesforce.com have anything to do with the Internet of Things?
-By Griffin Addison | [email protected]
Salesforce.com has an interesting take on the Internet of Things (IoT). They look at it as a technology that was a buzz word, but is now moving into the mainstream. Similar perhaps to how LTE, or Gigabit internet, or Cloud, or Big Data were (and may still remain) buzzwords, but have resulted in multi-billion dollar companies.
"As the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves from buzzword to best practice, businesses are looking harder than ever at how to generate value from the trillions of events generated by connected devices."
The Internet of Things represents the mullions and billions of potentially real-world devices that bring data to and from servers. For example, a connected washing machine may have sensors that detect if there's laundry in it, if it's running, or how much power it is using. This data could be send to a central server which manages other appliances in your house, or in the world and could make decisions about when to run the washing machine for instance, to save the most power. The information is sent back to the appliance, and thus provides a better user experience and better functionality than a machine that isn't connected. That's the Internet of Things in a nut shell.
Salesforce looks for way to combine device data from many different devices, and apply it to customer data to make better decisions and to give customers better analytics or insights.
Amazon has their own IoT platform and Salesforce has been partnered with Amazon's Web Services. Within the partnership, Salesforce is now enabling its customers to connect their IoT devices directly to Salesforce and not have to go through the Amazon platform. While AWS is likely still used in the backend, Salesforce would now be able to directly analyze the data in real-time on their cloud platform. This could enable new revenue opportunities for customers. For example, if a garbage collection firm connected all of their endpoint trashcans to the platform, they might be able to detect when the cans were empty or full, and optimize the route for collecting this garbage.
The Internet of Things has many use cases for every type of industry, and Salesforce's IoT integrations will further empower their customers.