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An excerpt follows:
Update: A company statement from Geofeedia was added to this post after it was originally published. . | Enterprise |
We’ve been hearing all artificial intelligence, all the time from the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry over the last several weeks. | Artificial Intelligence |
Microsoft is the latest to trumpet its AI capabilities for sales people with the general availability of Dynamics 365 coming on November 1st.
Microsoft announced last summer that it was going to be combining its ERP and CRM into a unified solution, and this is the culmination of that announcement. | Artificial Intelligence |
Like many large organizations, Microsoft tends to deliver the news in waves — it’s coming, it’s in beta, it’s here.
While the news smacks of “look at me too,” Microsoft points out it has been working on AI long before its biggest competitors like Salesforce and Oracle, which recently announced their own AI capabilities at their respective customer conferences, Dreamforce and Oracle Open World.
Microsoft has built in a couple of intelligence features into the release designed specifically for sales and service personnel. First, there is Customer Insights, a stand-alone cloud service, which enables users to bring in a variety of internal and external data sources. | Artificial Intelligence |
Companies can integrate all of this data with internal metrics (KPIs) to drive automated actions based on the data. | Artificial Intelligence |
The solution includes partner data from the likes of Facebook and Trip Advisor (proving you don’t need to own an external data source to take advantage of it).
It’s been designed as a stand-alone service that can work with any of the Dynamics 365 CRM components — sales, customer service or field service — and can also work with any external CRM tool with open APIs. | Artificial Intelligence |
This last point is particularly telling because it’s giving customers who might not be using Dynamics 365 (but are using other Microsoft tools like Outlook) access to this feature.
The second piece is called Relationship Insights, which as the name suggests gives sales people information about the status of their customer relationships at any given moment. | Artificial Intelligence |
It’s built on the on the Cortana Intelligence Suite, which Microsoft introduced in 2015 and uses tools like sentiment analysis to check on the likelihood of the deal closing and the next best action to take.
If this sounds familiar, it should because it’s very similar to what we’ve been hearing over the last month from a variety of CRM vendors. | Artificial Intelligence |
While you might legitimately wonder why sales and service people are the recipients of all the wonder that is AI in the enterprise, it seems like a reasonable starting point to improve the likelihood of making sales and understanding your customers better, an increasingly important capability in the mobile-social-cloud age.
It’s important to remember that we are really just at the rudimentary beginnings of where this type of technology could eventually take us. | Artificial Intelligence |
Over time we will see this intelligence added to bots (and other delivery methods) to hide the complexity of the underlying software and guide users to an answer or solution. | Artificial Intelligence |
The idea is to increase our productivity over time, although we are a long way from achieving that goal just yet.
For now, know that Microsoft has consolidated its artificial intelligence tools into a single, coherent division and just about every vendor — not just those selling CRM — is trying to build some level of intelligence into its products. Dynamics 365 is just the latest manifestation.. | Artificial Intelligence |
Last year Apttus, which provides pricing, quoting and contract building on the Salesforce platform was growing at a crazy rate. It appeared to be headed to IPO or a Salesforce purchase when it got a punch to the gut. | Cloud |
Salesforce bought Steelbrick instead.
Sources say, Apttus might have gotten greedy, thinking it was the only enterprise CPQ product out there that provided the best fit for Salesforce’s target enterprise customer base. These sources say, it believed it could ask Salesforce for a premium price. | Cloud |
Salesforce apparently balked and bought Steelbrick instead for $360 million.
While Salesforce didn’t get the heavy-duty enterprise customer base with Steelbrick, it got a better price, a similar product built on its platform and easy integration with the Salesforce product family. | Cloud |
It was willing to make that trade-off and Apttus was left to reevaluate its future without Salesforce as potential buyer. | Cloud |
While there was talk of a 2016 IPO, the market took the wind out of that discussion for this year.
After Salesforce’s bought Steelbrick, the first thing Apttus did was to begin to build some separation, porting the product from the only platform it had ever known to Microsoft Dynamics. | Cloud |
While Microsoft’s product has substantially less marketshare, it offers the kind of enterprise customers that fit well with Apttus’ customer base.
They also starting looking to the future and thinking about new ways to deliver the product. | Cloud |
Last week I visited the company booth at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s customer conference, where Apttus still has a substantial presence, and I saw a company experimenting with advanced technologies like virtual reality and bots.
I got a chance to try the application using Microsoft Hololens, the company’s virtual reality platform. | Cloud |
While it’s rough, it provides a pathway to deliver Apttus software via a virtual reality interface. In the demo, I’m inside an airplane and I can try different designs like single seat or double seats. | Cloud |
I can click the choice I want with a clicker in my hand, and as I make my choices, I can look to the side and see a pricing sheet with my choices and the total cost.
They have also developed a bot, which feels much further along than the VR application. Using the bot, you can undertake activities such as starting a contract, and copying content from another contract as the basis. | Cloud |
You can tell the bot what to edit, all with simple human commands and you generate a PDF at the end, which you can review and share.
It takes what once was a complex set of tasks involving a lot of copying and pasting and has distilled it down to a conversation with the software. | Cloud |
The bot, which is built using Microsoft Azure tools works in Slack and Skype for now, but could work with other messaging software in the future.
Apttus took a new $88 million round of funding at the end of last month on a reported valuation of $1.3 billion. | Cloud |
The company hasn’t made a secret of the fact it wants to go public, and expects to do that next year.
For now, with Salesforce no longer a likely suitor, the company is moving on and taking steps to ensure it can survive with Salesforce or without it — and bots and VR could be a big part of that.. | Cloud |
null | Enterprise |
After 20 months in a closed beta under the working title Facebook at Work, (as we predicted it would the other week) today Facebook is finally bringing its enterprise-focused messaging and social networking service to market under a new name, Workplace.
It’s not only armed with a new brand: Workplace is launching with a new kind of pricing model based on Facebook-style monthly active user metrics; and some pretty big ambitions after picking up 1,000 organizations as customers while still in its free, pilot mode (up from 100 a year ago).
Workplace — which is launching as a desktop and mobile app with News Feed, Groups both for your own company and with others, Chat direct messaging, Live video, Reactions, translation features, and video and audio calling — is now opening up to anyone to use, and the operative word here is “anyone”.
To really gain critical mass for the product and help it stand out from others in the market, Facebook is courting not just companies’ white-collar, desk-dwelling “knowledge workers” who typically buy and use enterprise messaging software.
It also wants to bring on the much wider global wedge of employees who serve customers, maintain machines or otherwise roam as part of their jobs — people who may already be using Facebook in their non-working life, but who have rarely been co-opted into an organization’s wider digital collaboration efforts in the past.
Workplace is opening for business long after a number of competing services have made their mark and picked up significant traction — popular rival software in the area of enterprise communication and messaging includes the likes of Slack, Yammer (now part of Microsoft), Chatter from Salesforce, Hipchat and Jive, among many others.
There are even a range of lesser-known business messaging apps built specifically for “non-desk” workers, including Zinc (originally called Cotap), Beekeeper and more.
Why the delay? “We had to build this totally separate from Facebook, and we had to test and get all the possible certifications to be a SaaS vendor,” Julien Codorniou, director of Workplace, explained in an interview in London, where the development of the product was based. | Enterprise |
Those developments are still happening. He told me that as of last week Workplace joined the US/EU Privacy Shield.
The other reason has to do with the kinds of companies and non-traditional SaaS buyers it was targeting. “We wanted to see how it would work in very conservative industries and government agencies,” he said. | Enterprise |
“We had to test the product in every possible geography and industry, especially the most conservative ones. We feel we are ready for primetime now.”
Workplace may not be first to the market, but it’s hoping to woo people with a few twists.
One of these comes in the form of pricing. | Enterprise |
Enterprise software companies typically follow a few standard business models: they include charging per-seat, based on a certain number of users at your company; in larger tiers based on the same principle of user numbers; based on feature sets; and under a freemium model, where you get a small number of basics for a small group, with the understanding that you soon be ramping up to more features in the paid tiers.
Facebook has thrown most of this out of the window and is opting instead to take a page from its own book of metrics.
It’s going to offer everyone the same features, and charge for Workplace by monthly active users — defined in this case as opening up and using Workplace at least once in the month. Facebook will charge $3 per user per month for the first 1,000 users; $2 for the next 1,001-10,000; and $1 for any MAUs above that.
(As a pricing point of comparison, Slack charges $8 and $15 per active user per month for two tiers of features, with the price going down if you pay annually. | Enterprise |
It has yet to launch its enterprise tier for extra-large organizations.)
The reason for the pricing by MAUs, and at these competitive prices, was made for a couple of reasons. For starters, it means that what is being bought becomes more transparent to the customer.
But also: Facebook then holds itself more accountable for the service. | Enterprise |
You pay only for what you are actually using, and Facebook essentially only gets paid for how engaging it’s managed to make the service, much like ads that run on the platform.
“We wanted to build enterprise software the Facebook way,” said Codorniou.
Another interesting aspect of the pricing concerns the tiers of numbers Facebook is throwing around. | Enterprise |
The company would not give us a total number of MAUs for Workplace as of today. | Enterprise |
But it is clear that the aim is to target very large companies and other organizations with this product.
Some of the early customers that Facebook has signed up have included 36,000 employees at the carrier Telenor, and 100,000 employees at the Royal Bank of Scotland, and today Facebook’s announcing more such as Danone (100,000 employees), Starbucks (238,000 employees) and Booking.com (13,000).
It also has organizations like the Royal National Institute for the Blind, Oxfam, and the Government Technology Agency of Singapore.
While Facebook is charging for Workplace, making tons of money from it doesn’t appear to be its actual goal — not at first, at least. | Enterprise |
The goal, Codorniou said, is to gain some critical mass for the product.
“We’re going to grow Workplace like Instagram and Messenger,” he said. “Before you even think about monetization, we want to spend the first years growing it. | Enterprise |
We are obsessed with growth.”
Another way that Facebook might just succeed with at least getting people to try out Workplace, if not switch over to using it permanently, is based on the fact that works just like Facebook itself.
With the main consumer service now pushing past 1.7 billion monthly active users, it’s likely that a good portion of a company’s employees will either already know the service, if not already use it.
This will mean people will be instantly familiar with how the product looks and works, which in the closed beta has translated into a very high amount of engagement with the product. | Enterprise |
Among the 1,000 companies and other organizations that have been using Workplace in its closed beta, there have been no fewer than 100,000 user groups already created.
As we have written about Facebook at Work in the past, much of Workplace will essentially look just like the Facebook you already know and probably use today.
There is a News Feed. | Enterprise |
There are Groups that you can build within your own company and with colleagues at other organizations that you work with regularly. There is a Messenger equivalent that Facebook refers to as “Chat”.
There is Live video as well as group video and audio calling. | Enterprise |
You can comment on posts with multi-emotional Reactions and there are automatic translation features.
There are also some partnerships from day one that speak to the aim of working with big enterprises that may already be using other services. | Enterprise |
They include the likes of Okta, OneLogin and Ping for log-ins and identity services, Box for storage, and integrators like Deloitte and Sada Systems.
But generally speaking, there isn’t a long list of integrations that will work with Workplace from the start, a la Slack, which lets you bring in work and data from hundreds of other apps with short-cut slash-commands.
Codorniou said that this was intentional.
“We wanted to talk about an easy to use product and democratic pricing with customers,” he said. | Enterprise |
“When I talked to the CEO of Danone, whose 100,000 employees include many people without computers and desks, usage and engagement were more important than whether Workplace integrated with Workday or Quip.”
(Interesting sidenote to this: for now, Cordorniou told me that Facebook requires all potential sales partners and integrators to actually sign up for Workplace and use it before they are allowed to work on it. | Enterprise |
“I don’t see how you can sell it without using it first,” he said.)
From what I understand, it’s likely that Slack-style integrations, along with other bells and whistles like bots and the multitude of other features that have invaded Messenger, are likely to come down the line very soon, with the first of them making an appearance at Facebook’s F8 conference this coming spring.
For now, the message to the market may be big enough: Facebook has become a de facto platform for billions of consumers globally to communicate with each other in the digital world, and now it is aggressively moving to be the same in the working world.. | Enterprise |
Salesforce has been on a shopping spree this year, spending in the neighborhood of $5-6 billion on 10 companies. That’s why it was interesting to hear company president, vice chairman and COO, Keith Block talk about what they look for in an acquisition target at a press conference at Dreamforce this week. | Cloud |
This is particularly true in the context of rumors that Salesforce was interested in buying Twitter.
First of all, it’s worth noting that most Salesforce purchases this year and over the years have typically been under $1 billion. The notable exception was the $2.8 billion the company spent for Demandware in June and the $2.5 billion it spent to buy ExactTarget in 2013. | Cloud |
A more comfortable level appears to be in the $100 – $300 million range (although the company spent $750 million to buy Quip last summer and a similar total amount to get the ad tech company Krux this week).
But there is more to a buying decision than purely just money — and this is worth keeping in mind in the context of a possible Twitter deal. | Cloud |
Block reiterated something that he said last year at the Dreamforce press conference — that Salesforce always looks at M&A activity in the context of the customer, and how the purchase will drive their relationship with their customers.
That said, he noted they do not do M&A willy-nilly. | Cloud |
They have a methodology and a list of companies they could be interested in at any given time, one which they are constantly updating. To get on the list, they look at a number of different criteria and balance what the target company could bring to Salesforce (and its customers), and the possible risk of buying the company.
“We look at culture. | Cloud |
Will it be a good cultural fit? Is it good product fit? Is there talent? Is there financial value? What are the risks of assimilating the company into our company,” Block explained.
He said once you acquire the company, you then have to balance integration versus innovation. | Cloud |
You’re buying the company for the technology, and you don’t want to quash all of the reasons you are spending the money to bring it into the fold. At the same time, there has to be some level of integration within the organization at large.
“If you drive growth and experimentation, you might not get leverage into the installed base. | Cloud |
If you push too hard on integration you get cost savings, but you might hurt innovation,” Block explained.
If you look at Quip as an example, Salesforce obviously sees Quip as a strategic asset or it wouldn’t have bought it, but the company continues to operate independently with customers outside of Salesforce. | Cloud |
At the same time, it has begun to build integration points from Quip into the Salesforce platform. So you can see the balance between integration and innovation right there.
As for Twitter, looking at the buying process Block outlined, it makes it appear even less likely that Salesforce would leave its purchase-price comfort zone. | Cloud |
Sure, all that real-time data is a tantalizing target, especially for a company pushing artificial intelligence, but the price has to be right, the fit has to be right, and it’s not clear it would be, or if it would be worth the significant financial risk.
This has to be part of standard on-going internal discussion at Salesforce as it looks at any acquisition target, and it would seem business discipline would require they stay true to that approach, regardless of the company they are looking at.. | Cloud |
An entrepreneur recently asked me “What are SaaS companies ‘going for’ these days?” I said, “Well, it depends on a number of factors, but 5 times annual run-rate revenue is average.” His response was pure disbelief. | Enterprise |
“What? You have to be kidding me! Last time I checked they were going for 10 times revenue!”
And so it goes; the opaque, confusing and highly volatile practice of valuing a private SaaS business is frustrating for entrepreneurs and investors alike. | Enterprise |
Furthermore, the lack of transparency adds a tremendous amount of friction to a capital raise or the sale of a company.
The reality is, it’s not all that hard to get a quick read on your SaaS company’s valuation. The two most important things to know are: What are public SaaS companies “going for” at the time, and how fast is your business growing relative to its peers. | Enterprise |
These two things will get you 75 percent of the way to an answer, and three or four other metrics will get you the rest of the way there.
The average public multiple is easy to get and it should always be updated when getting a read on valuation. Go here to pull the data and get the revenue multiple based on the current year expected revenue. | Enterprise |
Once you have that, subtract 1.3 to get the current private multiple based on ARR* (annualized run-rate revenue). Private multiples are lower because they are generally riskier and the stock is not easy to sell. | Enterprise |
If the public multiple were 7.0 times revenue, for example, then the average private multiple would be 5.7 times.
Building from there, the key company-specific metric is revenue growth rate. But it gets a little tricky here because to get a higher multiple, your company must be growing faster than other similar-sized SaaS companies. | Enterprise |
It’s easier to grow quickly when a company is small, and so the growth premium varies by company size.
The chart below shows the average growth rate for different-sized private SaaS companies based on a 2016 survey of 400 companies, and this should be used as your benchmark. | Enterprise |
If your company is growing faster than average for its size, the business will be worth more than the 5.7 times calculated above; if it’s growing slower, it will be worth less.
How much of an impact the growth rate has on valuation can be estimated based on public SaaS company values. | Enterprise |
A rule of thumb would be if your business is growing at twice the average rate, the valuation multiple would grow by 50 percent. For example, a $3.0 million SaaS company growing at 100 percent (twice the rate of its peers) would get a growth premium of 2.8 (50 percent of the baseline multiple of 5.7), making it worth about 8.5 times revenue, or $26 million. | Enterprise |
Similarly, a $60 million SaaS business growing at 50 percent is also growing twice as fast as its peers, and would also garner a similar growth premium.
There are four other metrics that will impact a company’s value beyond the current state of the public market and its growth rate. | Enterprise |
They are:
Do better than “average” on these factors and the valuation multiple will go up; do worse, and it will go down. The chart below can be used to estimate the overall impact of each factor.
The fact of the matter is, SaaS companies, on average, were never “going for 10 times revenue,” only a few outliers were. | Enterprise |
The reality is a little less sexy, but still very healthy, and knowing where your business stands based on real-world data will give you an advantage in negotiating the best possible outcome for your company.
* Based on an analysis of hundreds of private company exit multiples tracked by the 451 Group over 2014, 2015 and 2016, and compared to the public SaaS valuation data at the time.. | Enterprise |
null | Enterprise |
We’re hearing from several sources that a secondary financing round is in the works for GitHub, following its last $250 million financing round that valued it at $2 billion in July last year. However, there’s a little bit of interesting chatter beyond that they’re raising a secondary for potential liquidation of investors or employees, we hear.
There are two parts to the story: first, this secondary round may value the company below the $2 billion valuation from its previous round. | Enterprise |
One source estimated the range could even be around $1.5 billion, though we couldn’t pin down the exact number. However, another source tells us that this secondary is likely for common stock, which could complicate the matter a bit. | Enterprise |
It’s hard to tell exactly where preferences lie and what rights investors got, so the valuation calculation can get a little fuzzy here — and it may not, in the end, technically be a down round in the traditional sense.
But perhaps the more interesting one is that a rumor is flying around that Microsoft is sniffing around the company. | Enterprise |
We aren’t sure if it’s related to an acquisition or potentially a strategic investment (talks around one may inevitably lead to the other), or it could be that the companies may be exploring a deeper partnership. A representative from GitHub said there’s no truth to the Microsoft acquisition rumors, though declined to comment on the rest of the story. A representative from Microsoft declined to comment.
We weren’t able to learn who would be able to participate in this secondary round — whether it would be investors or employees. | Enterprise |
But either way, given that GitHub is an eight-year-old company, the liquidation event shouldn’t be super surprising.
GitHub is probably one of the most widely-adopted developer tools in the world — serving as a go-to resource for not only managing code repositories, but also a vital part of the whole open source ecosystem. | Enterprise |
Keeping those open-source projects healthy and active is a pivotal tool for larger companies, which can use contributors as a farm system for their developer teams and also pick off interesting ideas that pop up from those communities. But like any light-touch resource for traditional developers, the company needs to expand into enterprises if it’s going to grow into a fully sustainable business. That’s going to be incredibly challenging.
Speaking of Microsoft — they also have GitHub-like tools within Visual Studio Team Services, so perhaps that’s where the chatter about the company checking in with GitHub is coming from.
GitHub also faces increasing competition, including from the likes of recently-IPO’d Atlassian. | Enterprise |
Last year, following its IPO, the company immediately jumped 32% on its first day of trading and valued it at $5.8 billion. That was largely on the strength of the company actually being profitable when it went public. There’s also the recently-emerging GitLab, which is based on open-source Git tools, that raised $20 million just last month.. | Enterprise |
null | Cloud |
When Salesforce purchased Quip last summer for $750 million, it seemed at face value to be an unusual acquisition for the cloud CRM company — Salesforce tends to concentrate on more vertical targets.
In fact, at a press conference this week at Dreamforce, Salesforce president, vice chairman and COO Keith Block — yes, he has all those titles — said when asked about the company’s acquisition strategy, “We go very hard into vertical markets.” He then used the company’s $2.8 billion Demandware purchase as a prime example of this approach.
Quip is the opposite. | Cloud |
It’s a productivity app, designed to be mobile first, and which builds in collaboration and communication right at the document level. | Cloud |
Quip founder and CEO Bret Taylor said they really wanted to put the communication component front and center when they were designing the app.
Block has said in the past that when it comes to acquisitions, his company is always looking for better ways to serve the customer — theirs and those of their users. | Cloud |
He admits Quip may not seem obvious as a product that serves the customer, but it’s about productivity, and that’s something that could touch every part of the Salesforce platform.
“Quip is very compelling. Some people think it’s an unorthodox acquisition, but it’s in the context of driving productivity for customers,” he said.
Taylor unsurprisingly agrees. | Cloud |
“One way to think about it is that a lot of their products are vertical. Productivity is horizontal. | Cloud |
Ours is a separate product and can integrate into all the Salesforce products,” he said.
There was also a good cultural match, and Salesforce liked the Quip team, a point that Block says the company looks at very closely when making acquisition decisions.
When Quip was sold, it came as a bit of a surprise, but Taylor said he and his team saw an opportunity to reach a scale that would have taken years on their own. | Cloud |
He points to the scope of the Dreamforce conference as a prime example of the reach of Salesforce. The company boasted that 175,000 people registered for the event. | Cloud |
It’s doubtful that many showed up, but even so, it’s an enormous event and Quip had a big presence there, which wouldn’t have been possible before the acquisition.
The idea of a deeper relationship began shortly after Quip agreed to build a Salesforce Lightning module earlier this year. It didn’t take long for the discussions to advance beyond that, and they began to talk about something deeper. | Cloud |
It didn’t hurt that Taylor and Salesforce CEO and chairman Marc Benioff have known each other for a long time, and that really helped advance the discussion.
At Dreamforce, Quip announced some direct integrations with Salesforce, including (as you would expect) single sign-on and the previously mentioned Lightning module to enable users to link, access and create Quip documents, spreadsheets and task lists inside of Salesforce. | Cloud |
Finally, it includes what they are calling “rich mentions.” These are live Salesforce fields that live inside Quip documents, so if you drag closed deal data into your document, it will update automatically each time the deal data info changes in Salesforce.
For those who aren’t interested in Salesforce, Quip is still available as a standalone product, and in fact continues to operate as a separate company within the larger entity. | Cloud |
But it’s clear that the integrations announced this week at Dreamforce are only the beginning of what we will see in the future, and Quip is very much an important part of the Salesforce product family — even if it might seem like an atypical one.. | Cloud |
Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff knows a thing or two about how to put on a good show. As usual, he pulled out all the stops this week at Dreamforce, his company’s massive customer conference in San Francisco.
He was boasting at the keynote that 175,000 people registered online (and another 15 million were watching online). | Cloud |
I can tell you most people I spoke to didn’t think anywhere close to that number of people showed up, but it was also hard to tell. The conference was spread out across the city, including all three Moscone buildings and some of the hotels nearby. Many restaurants around Moscone were closed for private events from sponsors. | Cloud |
The company even took over the street between Moscone North and South, laid down some fake grass and put in “Dream Park.”
This year there was a national park theme and there were signs everywhere that echoed the design of the iconic national park signs. The idea was that every participant was an explorer blazing trails. | Cloud |
It was part of the gamification of the event to get people to visit as much stuff as possible.
The event, built in its chairman’s image, included charity booths, a mindfulness booth staffed by French monks and a meditation room. One of the special guests at the keynote was Will.I.Am. The conference party featured a performance by U2. | Cloud |
Salesforce doesn’t do anything small.
But in the end, when you take out the fake grass lawn, the cartoon Einstein that joined Benioff and co-founder Parker Harris on stage for the keynote — Einstein is part of Salesforce’s latest initiative involving artificial intelligence — and all of the smoke and mirrors, it was ultimately about entertaining and informing customers, and selling Salesforce as a visionary company.
At a press conference on Thursday, company vice chairman, president and COO Keith Block talked about Salesforce’s ability to deliver new technology to the masses as a key strength of the company. | Cloud |
“The message is embrace this technology. We believe we are uniquely qualified to deliver this technology,” he said.
Perhaps the delivery part is a bit overstated, but certainly Salesforce seems to have a unique ability to introduce new tech, whether it’s the social enterprise, big data, the Internet of Things or artificial intelligence. | Cloud |
Surely those of us who write about this stuff for a living have heard it all, but the folks who attend this conference probably only have a slight idea of what these concepts are about. | Cloud |
Benioff and Salesforce talk about these ideas in ways that regular business users can understand.
Artificial intelligence took center stage at this year’s Dreamforce, and it’s a challenge to explain these concepts to the masses. The fact is that Einstein, which was announced a couple of weeks before Dreamforce, isn’t actually a product. | Cloud |
It’s a set of technologies that underly the Salesforce platform and add a level of intelligence to each of the products (or will over time).
Perhaps because artificial intelligence is hard to explain, Salesforce decided to productize it in the form of Einstein. By giving it the name of a really smart person, maybe it drove home exactly how revolutionary this technology could be. | Cloud |
Of course, in its current early guise, it’s not that earth-shattering, offering predictive lead scoring and opportunity insights, which alert a rep how a deal is trending. These are frankly a rudimentary beginning, but this is the typical approach for Salesforce.
They get everyone revved up and thinking about these advanced concepts and they layer them onto the platform over time. | Cloud |
The company philosophy involves staying on top of trends and introducing them early.
Dreamforce included something for everyone, with 2,700 sessions running non-stop from 8:00 in the morning until late in the afternoon. Parties abounded at night and bars overflowed with raucous attendees. There were partner pavilions and hands-on demos. There was live music on a large stage in Dream Park. | Cloud |
There were bean bag chairs, benches and hammocks scattered across the fake green lawn. It was, for all intents and purposes, a three-ring circus.
To be fair, it wasn’t all business. Benioff continually touted charity and giving back to the community, and he seemed sincere about it. “You are at work, and you have great leadership skills. | Cloud |
You can isolate yourselves and say I’m going to put those skills to use in a box at work, or you can say I’m going to have an integrated life. The way I look at the world, I’m going to put those skills to work to make the world a better place,” Benioff said at one point during the event.
From a news perspective, not that much came out of the conference. | Cloud |
The Salesforce-Twitter rumors persisted, although they diminished somewhat throughout the week. Salesforce did buy an adtech company, but most of the product news was announced well before the conference. The thing is that the conference wasn’t put on for the likes of me. | Cloud |
It was more about putting on a show for customers, while showing off the pure economic strength and vitality of Salesforce.
And it was about dreaming of big things — and pageantry, showmanship and bread and circuses.. | Cloud |
Emburse launched in the Startup Battlefield last year seeking out businesses that wanted to handle one-time or a few expenses through issuing prepaid corporate debit cards. | Enterprise |
But it may be that the market, which is filled with a disparate different kinds of tools, needs a more generalized approach.
So to move beyond that, Emburse said it is opening up its service to integrate with other operations, such as building bots on Slack. | Enterprise |
With that, companies can spin up and issue prepaid cards through a number of other integrations without always having to come back to Emburse. | Enterprise |