Salesforce Gets Into Internet Of Things Market With IoT Cloud

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Salesforce is getting in on the Internet Of Things market with IoT Cloud, announced at the company’s Dreamforce customer conference on Tuesday. IoT Cloud is designed to help businesses connect with and respond to their customers using connected devices.

“Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Customers,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive officer, Salesforce.“The IoT Cloud will allow businesses to create real-time 1:1, proactive actions for sales, service, marketing or any other business process, delivering a new kind of customer success.

Powered by the company’s new real-time processing engine called Thunder, Salesforce IoT Cloud takes in data generated by connected apps, devices and more. It can then pull that data together to develop profiles of customers and devices. It can trigger actions based on rules as data changes in real-time — for example, taking a specific action to engage with customers after a specific period of time. Businesses can respond to customers and employees through Salesforce’s other services, such as Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, App Cloud or Community Cloud.

IoT partners at launch will include ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC ThingWorx and Xively LogMeIn.

The number of connected devices is projected to top 75 billion by 2020, according to a Cisco study, and a recent McKinsey report pegs the economic impact of IoT applications at $11.1 trillion annually by 2025.

Salesforce says IoT Cloud will pilot in the first half of 2016 and roll out generally later in the year, and pricing will be announced at that time.

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Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media's Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.