Salesforce channel chiefs Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, vice president of partner program and marketing and Dylan Steel, senior director of product marketing for app cloud and IoT cloud explore the ways initial IoT partners are working with Salesforce and customers.
Q: Who have been the earliest adopters for the IoT platform?
A: Some of our earliest adopters from a customer perspective are customers like Emerson Climate Technologies (who build HVAC systems for home heating and cooling). They’ve already built the connected thermostats, but they’re thinking about how to get the most value out of them. We’ve seen early adopters from high-tech industries to a waste management company who is looking to put sensors on trash cans to understand when they’re full.
Q: At what point does your phone start ringing off the hook with existing customers wanting to know how the IoT platform can benefit them?
A: For something like IoT, we brief our partners in advance and then we run trainings. It’s not the most scalable way, but in the beginning, it is the way to do a very focused knowledge transfer. And then we think about it in phases. And in phase two, we’ve got special partner pages within our partner community, and a landing page for IoT with resources and people that they can reach out to when they want to learn more.
Q: We’re seeing a lot of activity around smart cities. Do you think municipal governments, transportation systems, and all these different verticals will fold nicely into what your building?
A: I do see smart cities and smart governments fitting in nicely with the technology we’re building. And we are building in a few stages. The first stage is how do we move from a reactive world where you identify an issue and then you go out and fix it to a proactive world? And that’s the journey we’re on today. We’ve actually built a monitoring system that allows us to fix a potential error that could be triggered in the future. There’s a next step to that evolution which is moving from proactive to a predictive world, which is: how do we fix a problem before it actually even exists? When you think about connected cities, they’re thinking about how can we look at this aggregate set of large data and make inferences that are predictive to help our city operate more efficiently? I think that’s all on the roadmap.
