Skip to main content

Salesforce announcements on different topics - but are they different?


The News

In the past month, Salesforce made announcements around some interesting topics. First, beginning of October, the company introduced Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases, a web tool that is targeted at helping businesses identify viable use cases and provide some information about what it takes to support it.
It starts with information and videos that explain AI, terms around AI and give some examples how AI can help improve different aspects of a business.  According to Sarin Devraj, Associate Product Marketing Manager Salesforce Einstein, for time being the site covers some fifty use cases but will be updated regularly to increase the coverage of relevant and interesting use cases. The website is intended to be top-of-funnel.
The second and more recent announcement was about introducing Lightning Order Management, which shall enable brands to deliver end-to-end commerce experiences from shopping to shipping. Lightning Order Management is currently in beta and will be made available later this year. Right now it focuses on B2C processes. Based upon Lightning and enabled by Salesforce’s vast partner network, Lightning Order Management offers a low code platform that helps companies to easily create order management flows, including some partner applications. Salesforce expects the number of partner applications to increase steadily.
Lastly, in the beginning of November, Salesforce announced its own Salesforce CMS, a hybrid content management system designed to help easily create and deliver content across channels. Salesforce CMS is designed to be simple, fast yet flexible, and closely connected to the Salesforce infrastructure. For time being Salesforce CMS is geared towards the Salesforce B2C e-commerce solution, but shall be extended to support B2B e-commerce.

The Bigger Picture

The world of engagement management (or, as other people say, experience management), is tightly coupled and needs many different types of applications working tightly integrated, including the necessity to create and disseminate knowledge. In other words, it has turned to be a platform world.
These three announcements that cover vastly different topics, but towards the same goal, demonstrate the value that lies in a strong technology platform which supports an ecosystem that creates a win-situation not only for the platform owner, but also for partners, customers, and their customers.
There is a tremendous potential in implementing business applications that are supported by AI, both in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. However, the decision about the application of AI in businesses has a number of challenges, ranging from ethical questions, via compliance, security and strategic right down to operational questions. All of them need to be addressed to successfully implement AI in an organization on more than just a tactical level.
Salesforce cites three:
1.     Identification of a viable use case and having the right data to support it
2.     Addressing change within the employee work force and embracing new technology
3.     Trusting whether the AI is correct and aligns with company values
Out of these they tackled the most technology orientated – and the easiest to implement one, which is also the one Salesforce can help best with. The second one is also about culture and the third one is really hard to do as it also and especially includes the need for an AI to be able to explain itself.
Covering the order management aspect of e-commerce is one of the most important capabilities a vendor of e-commerce software needs to be able to cover. This is by its very nature a capability that gives full suite vendors an edge over front office focused companies like Salesforce. And even for suite vendors some of the necessary capabilities are beyond their scope, like tracking and tracing of a delivery (which is covered by a logistics provider) or payment, which is covered by a payment provider, e.g. to be better able to ensure PCI compliance. Topics like a ticket management that is integrated into the e-commerce solution are table stakes. What really matters is the ability to easily set up and efficiently maintain a process that enables e-commerce customers to achieve their goal with minimum own effort from awareness through support phases of their individual journey.
And a CMS is all about enabling the delivery of the good news in an effective, consistent, and efficient way. That’s why, while a good headless CMS does the job (and a good one to it), an own CMS that is tightly integrated into the platform, can offer even more value. It reduces the time to value for the customer by offering a tight integration into connected pieces of the suite, be them an e-commerce solution,

My Analysis and PoV

Let’s start with Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases. It certainly is a nifty site that provides interesting and helpful information. A corporate web site being what it is: a marketing instrument – Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases is of course geared around Salesforce products. While there is nothing wrong with this, by excluding partner solutions it restricts its usefulness, even within the Salesforce ecosystem.
The site will be updated with new use cases from a bank of existing ones. This will happen twice a year. It still being a young tool, Salesforce can decide to extend its scope at any time to cover more solutions, including partner solutions. This would be a good idea, especially considering that Salesforce has a thriving partner ecosystem. Salesforce and the partner ecosystem could get promoted by a decision towards this.
Lightning order management reduces a gap that Salesforce has qua mission: The company has its focus on front office processes and supports back office processes, like order management, by virtue of a strong ecosystem and by offering the glue to connect the different pieces of necessary software. This is exemplified here. Salesforce offers to connect a good number of delivery processes to support the e-commerce process. I think that the acquisition of Mulesoft had a major influence in making this possible, including the integration of the service functionality, which, to be frank, is table stakes in the current world. Still, Salesforce connected it into one competitive and seamless whole.
This is also evidenced by Salesforce e-commerce solution being part of a tightly spaced leader group in Gartner’s recent magic quadrant on digital commerce solutions (along with Adobe’s Magento, Oracle and SAP Commerce).
The addition of the CMS is the icing on the cake. To be sure, it is a new solution that still has a few gaps, including good support for responsive design. But given some time, it surely will not only support page fragments but might help in building complete sites with a tight integration into e-commerce, marketing, sales force automation and customer service. Not to mention analytics. Think Hubspot on steroids.
Three separate announcements – one mission – showing the power of a platform. I can only guess that these developments happened in a harmonized way. If not, imagine what could happen if there was a harmonization.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

Zoho - How a technology company reimagines business software

The News   On May 4, 2023, Zoho held its Zoholics conference in Austin, TX which included a media and analyst track in addition to the customer track. After all, Zoholics is a customer event. During this event, about 80 participants of the former track had ample opportunity to learn about and discuss the latest news at Zoho. We also had the opportunity to listen to - and question - a panel of customers who gave candid answers about their journey with Zoho and challenges they faced. Of course there was plenty of room for mingling and networking with Zoho executives and, of course, with analysts and customers. In addition to the breaks between the tracks, there was a pre-evening reception, a dinner on the event day and a casual brunch at the Zoho farm just outside of Austin.  As usual for Zoho, the sessions were less about feeding us with PowerPoint (or Zoho Show, to be precise. Why would Zoho not use a Zoho product?) but about giving good information and a genuine interest in getting fe
Post a Comment
Read more

Don't mess with Zoho - A Zohoday 2022 recap

After spending two days in Austin, TX, attending the ZohoDay 2022, it is time for a little recap of this interesting event.  We were 99 analysts and 24 customers and plenty of knowledgeable Zoho personnel. The incredible Sandra Lo and her team organized the event around open and transparent communication. So, there was plenty of access for us to customers and the Zoho team.  Which was very important, as already the keynote session by founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu was quite hardcore. Vembu talked about how strategy and culture need to be one, how culture needs to be the root of strategy, and how Zoho implements this. The Zoho strategy lies on three main pillars ·       Transnational localism, a unique concept that in its essence is about embedding a company into a local community by not only selling into it but also by investing into it. This investment is e.g., by offering high paying jobs in areas where these are scarce, by fostering local education, but also by own local sourcing in
Post a Comment
Read more

SugarCRM explains how the third wave of CRM adds value

The news On October 4 and 5, 2023, SugarCRM held its Connected event followed by an analyst summit in London. The first day – Connected – was targeted mostly at customers while the second day focused on analysts.  The event started off with an intense speech by Katherine Grainger, DBE , a British rowing champion. Her core messages were about team bonding, the importance of communication, continuous improvement, and perseverance (well, at least that’s my take). This was followed by information about what is new in the software and, more importantly, a customer panel.  The main sponsor, Mobileforce , placed some words about the partnership. In addition, the analysts had 1:1s with customers, partners, and Sugar executives. The second day was filled with information targeted at analysts. CEO Craig Charlton and his executive team shared about financial status, strategy and more in-depth product news. Sugar being a privately held, VC backed company, the financials are of course under NDA, s
Post a Comment
Read more

Relevance, reliability, responsibility are key for AI – the SAP way

The News A lot is going on in the SAPverse during October and the early days of November 2023. First, SAP conducted its CXLive event with CX-related announcements, then the company reported good Q3/2023 figures, a new version of its CX software that includes new generative AI capabilities got released and lastly, it executed its SAP TechEd event with a good number of AI-, BTP-, and ERP related announcements. As this is quite a lot, I covered the CX world in a previous post and will cover the TechEd related news in this post.  So, what is new at SAP TechEd ? For one, it is enough to fill a 17-page pre-event news guide that SAP sent out. SAP certainly is able to stack up the news for major events. I took the liberty to ask ChatGPT for a summary of the document, which I slightly edited afterwards. Here we are: AI and Development Environments: ·       SAP introduces SAP Build Code with generative AI, improving application development and testing, while new AI capabilities are integrate
Post a Comment
Read more

How to play the long game Zoho style

The news On February 7 and 8 2024, Zoho held its annual ZohoDay conference, along with a pre-conference get together and an optional visit to SpacX’s not-too-far-away Starbase. Our guide, who went by Chief, and is probably best described as a SpaceX-paparazzi was full of facts and anecdotes, which made the visit very interesting although we couldn’t enter Starbase itself. The event was jam-packed with 125 analysts, 17 customer speakers, and of course Zoho staff for us analysts to talk to. This was a chance we took up eagerly. This time, the event took place in MacAllen, TX, instead of Austin, TX. The reason behind this is once more Zoho’s ruralization strategy, transnational localism.  Which gives also one of the main themes of the event. It was more about understanding Zoho than about individual products, although Zoho disclosed some roadmaps. More about understanding Zoho in a second.  The second main theme was customer success and testimonials. Instead of bombarding us with presenta
Post a Comment
Read more