SAN FRANCISCO---Salesforce.com is installing another pillar to its cloud empire, and the latest one taps into a powerful trend taking the tech world by storm this year. That would be the now ubiquitous Internet of Things, a.k.a. "IoT." Unveiled at start of the CRM giant's annual conference extravaganza on Tuesday, the new Salesforce IoT Cloud is yet another component of the company's clouds (see: Sales, Service and Marketing) promising analyzed data in real-time for faster insights and actions. The IoT Cloud will be sourcing its data from more than just some of the apps, software integrations and mobile device links (such as the Salesforce1 platform) that have been unveiled on the Dreamforce main stage in years past. Looking bigger and farther down the line toward the connected world countless predictions are calling for, the IoT Cloud will be heavily leaning on sensors installed on everything from smartphones and cars to windmills and industrial turbines, funneling that information back to Salesforce channels for near immediate responses to service cases. A few potential use cases, according to Salesforce, include in-car sensors for identifying possible erratic driving, which could come in hand for car rental and insurance companies alike. The IoT Cloud was designed to make these real-time connections possible through another technology Salesforce is heavily flaunting this week dubbed Thunder, an event processing engine built for massive scale with services across identity management and app development, integration, compliance. Thunder falls under the Salesforce App Cloud umbrella, which already hosts more than 5.5 million apps as well as the AppExchange digital marketplace. The IoT Cloud is scheduled to launch in pilot mode during the first half of 2016. General availability -- as well as pricing details -- are slated to follow later in 2016.
Marc Benioff has unveiled its new service for storing and analysing IoT data at its Dreamforce event, which opened yesterday in San Francisco. The service, due to launch a beta in early 2016, is powered by Marc Benioff's open source event system, Thunder. CEO, Salesforce, annoucned that the company is "turning the internet of things into the internet of customers". Users will be able to write rules and real-time logic to find the data most relevant to them.