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Salesforce Debuts Inbox And Field Service Tools In CEO Benioff's 'Half-time Show' To Product Roadmap

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Metallica played, then Marc Benioff  and newly-promoted COO Keith Block began unveiling Salesforce’s product roadmap for a new fiscal year. The new products centered largely around improvements to its core sales platform, relaunched in recent months as Lightning.

"Companies can step forward into this age of the customer and unshackle themselves from legacy technologies," Block told the crowd of press and insiders at an event at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco, after Lars Ulrich and his band warmed up the crowd. The centerpiece of that philosophy and the new road map were new additions to Lightning including an inbox product and a new field service product, in what Benioff joked was the company's "half-time show" between its annual Dreamforce conferences.

(More than 20,000 peopled tuned in to the announcements by livestream at any given time, causing the feed to continually freeze. Perhaps Salesforce could've used Ustream, a video streaming startup acquired by IBM in January. Update: A Salesforce rep says the company didn't get other complaints of a buggy feed but did, coincidentally, use Ustream for the event.)

Salesforce unveiled a new app within its sales platform, Lightning, called SalesforceIQ Inbox. "What if I was closing business from my email," asked Alex Dayon, the company's president of products. "It connects your CRM to your email in one experience," a complicated task on the back-end, Dayon said. Its field service addition is intended to make it easier for companies that rely upon dispatchers and field agents to change work orders and job statuses on the go.

Benioff's cofounder Parker Harris announced the company's 49th major release to go live on Friday, featuring more than 175 features including ongoing integration with partner Microsoft. Salesforce's 50th will go live in June, focused on mobile. Those updates will feature more improvements to Lightning, as well as improvements to Salesforce's marketing product such as "predictive journeys," a product that allows marketers to engage customers differently based on how Salesforce's algorithms label them as likely to buy.

At Dreamforce in 2015, the company had unveiled a look at the new version of the RelateIQ product acquired by Salesforce in 2014, as well as a new focus on a cloud platform to support companies operating in the Internet of Things. That followed the major facelift to Salesforce’s core platform, now more than a decade old and showing its age in its user interface, as Lightning. In just a few weeks, Lightning's been adopted by 90,000 customers, Dayon said on Tuesday.

Benioff also formally introduced Block as the company's chief operating officer. The Oracle veteran had joined Salesforce as president and vice chairman in 2013. Block's focused especially on landing large million-dollar type customers for Salesforce, a mission he discussed at length with FORBES last June.

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