Meet the new kid on the IoT block: Salesforce announces new IoT Cloud at Dreamforce

Salesforce is the latest entrant in the Internet of Things race. Planning to ride on the IoT wave, Salesforce wants to revolutionize customer services and take meeting customer expectations to a whole new level with its IoT Cloud. Salesforce unveiled the IoT Cloud at Dreamforce, its customer conference that opened at San Francisco. Powered by Thunder, a scalable, real-time processing engine, it aims to achieve three things: listen to the world at IoT scale, trigger actions with real-time rules, and use Salesforce to proactively engage.  Proactive is the keyword here. Adam Bosworth, EVP, Salesforce IoT Cloud explains in his blog how IoT is the core of a customer-centric revolution. He gives the example of cars reminding their owners to schedule a service appointment or airline booking a flier’s preferred replacement flight following a cancellation. “They (mobile phones and smart devices) 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,” says Bosworth. Bosworth says that the IoT Cloud is Salesforce’s answer to how they could help their customers use the Internet of Things to connect and respond to their customers in a whole new way. With the Salesforce IoT Cloud, customers 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. The data can be filtered and assembled in a way that can be referenced with no limits. Once the relevant data is captured, rules can be set around it. The tool also lets users add intelligence. That way, every time data changes, or a new event comes in, users can describe how they want to respond and trigger the appropriate action. Looking under the hood, Bosworth’s plan was to use open source technologies used for big data and allow Salesforce to be the user interface for the platform. The primary technologies behind Thunder include Spark – a large scale data processing engine, Storm – an open source distributed real-time computation system to process streams of data, Kafka – the Apache project and a messaging broker that can handle massive amounts of reads and writes per second. It also uses Cassandra – a scalable open source database that bigwigs such as Apple, Instagram and Netflix are already using. It also uses Heroku, Salesforce’s platform-as-a-Service.