Enterprise software companies are thinking along the same lines this week: a day after Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP committed to a data-oriented partnership across several of their products, Salesforce plans to announce Tuesday that it is doing something similar on its own platform.
Later today at Dreamforce 2018, Salesforce will announce Salesforce Customer 360, a dashboard being released as a pilot program that pulls together data about a customer from multiple consumer-oriented Salesforce products, such as its Service Cloud customer-resource management software-as-a-service, or others like Marketing Cloud, its customer-experience service. The idea, once the service becomes available in late 2019, is to let Salesforce administrators pull all that data together in hopes of finding something interesting that would have never come to light with separate pools of that data.
And for application data that sits outside Salesforce, the company plans to tout new integrations made possible by its acquisition of Mulesoft earlier this year that work with Customer 360. Mulesoft helps companies pull data out of older on-premises servers into Salesforce, and Customer 360 users will be able to view data surfaced by Mulesoft alongside their Salesforce data in this console.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella brought two other CEOs — Shantanu Narayen of Adobe and Bill McDermott of SAP — to his opening keynote at Ignite 2018 to talk about a new partnership between the three companies that does something similar between some of their products. Most tech companies make it as easy as possible to accept your data while making it more difficult to move that data somewhere else, both for selfish reasons and because unifying data across multiple software vendors can be a tricky process.
Customer 360 will allow admins to automatically update customer profiles across multiple Salesforce products, or allow customer-service agents to very quickly see a past record of customer purchases. Salesforce will also build several pre-determined starter models to give customers a sense of what they might be able to figure out from new approaches at examining that data, and at some point it will extend these capabilities to its flagship Sales cloud product.
Slightly more than half of all Salesforce enterprise customers are using one than one of its products, according to a 2017 investor presentation. While Salesforce still gets the bulk of its revenue from its flagship Sales Cloud, the other products — Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Marketing Cloud — have been growing as fast if not faster than the flagship product, based on recent financial results.
[Editor’s Note: Salesforce is a GeekWire annual sponsor.]
