The 18th of May 2017 saw the Salesforce World Tour come to the ExCeL in London. The largest Salesforce event outside of Dreamforce, some 10,000 attendees had a day packed with Keynotes, Breakout Sessions and the expected ceremony of a Salesforce event.
The keynote set the theme for the day. Salesforce are now officially one of the top 5 growing enterprise companies, hitting $8.4 billion in revenue last year. They also announced they run a carbon-neutral cloud, with zero net-emissions.
Salesforce recognise the skills shortage in the ecosystem, and to that end are investing into shrinking the skills gap. I was happy to see prominence given to The Challenge, a charity that helps young people get a better start in life.
Continuing the theme of the customer being at the heart of every business, emphasis was put on the ways that Salesforce has invested in Artificial Intelligence and how this will be used to further break down the walls around whats possible.
Teaming up with IBM’s Watson technology, Salesforce Einstein and Watson together were demo’ed to show how an insurer can utilise weather forecasting and weather warnings along with previous customer engagements and notify customers (using their preferred contact method) of a car insurance company to store their vehicles away when hail is imminent.
Next, Lightning, Quip, Salesforce1 and Thunder IoT cloud were all mentioned to address the speed at which apps can be built, teams made more productive, mobility is taken care of, and businesses can manage and monitor connected devices easily without any heavy lifting.
Demonstrations from Hive and Amazon Web Services show how Salesforce clouds can be combined to deliver effective customer service. I was glad to see more emphasis on Service and IoT this time around compared to the Sales Cloud-heavy demonstrations of the past.
As per usual there was a packed expo hall, although I was glad that this year the attendee count was a little more restricted meaning that there was some room to move!
I attended the Trailhead zone and focussed my day on the Salesforce for I.T. theme, taking in talks on Lightning, Einstein and Heroku - an area I’d like to focus on more. I was impressed with the usual upbeat nature of the day - it really was like a mini-Dreamforce.