Salesforce.com Inc. introduced several new product updates to its updated platform, along with some packaging and pricing changes to its services on Tuesday.
The San Francisco-based firm previewed its product strategy for the year ahead in a live webcast hosted by Salesfore.com CEO Marc Benioff and other executives. The talk was held in front of a live audience, and opened with a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner by Metallica.
Salesforce introduced several updates to its first app built on its new Lightning platform, Sales Cloud Lightning, which was first unveiled at last year’s Dreamforce conference and made generally available in October. An update to its existing Sales Cloud product that most might know as Salesforce CRM, the new update will give developers more power in customizing what the app can do for a company.
New apps are also available as part of the Sales Cloud, including:
- SteelBrick CPQ, billing automation software that is now available after Salesforce.com closed its acquisition of SteelBrick on Monday.
- Lightning Voice, which embeds a click-to-call function within Sales Cloud with auto-logging of the call.
- SalesforceIQ Inbox is the result of another Salesforce acquisition in RelateIQ. It takes the data you have in Salesforce’s CRM and pushes it to you when it’s most relevant, as you read your email.
- Sales Wave App serves up customized analytics dashboards to your smartphone or even a smart watch.
Salesforce has also revamped its Service Cloud with the new Lightning platform, updating the Field Service product to help dispatchers assign staff with automatic assignments based on skills. A new Omni-Channel supervisor gives call center managers insight into their agent’s workloads.
Also on Tuesday, Keith Block, vice-chairman and president was promoted to being Salesforce.com’s chief operating officer. Block joined Salesforce after a long career at Oracle Corp., often depicted as a rival to Salesforce. He made some remarks on the webcast about how customers are using Salesforce’s services.
“What’s happening is this perfect storm of cloud, and mobile, and data storage, and IoT technologies is all coming together,” Block said. “It has profound implications and it’s exciting, what’s happening.”
Salesforce also updated its packaging and pricing of services. This chart explains the updated system:
