14 DAY TRIAL // At its Dreamforce developer conference that took place over the past weekend, Salesforce announced a brand-new cloud offering called IoT Cloud, targeting the rising Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem.
Famous for its managed, cloud-based CRM software, Salesforce has been slowly buying more companies in recent years, expanding to become a Top 500 company in the US.
With the world moving to add Internet connections for everything ranging from fridges to cows, the Internet of Things is moving away from being an Arthur C. Clarke phantasmagoric concept to becoming a de-facto reality.
Trying to establish a foothold in this new market before bigger players swarm in, Salesforce, through its IoT offering, will try to provide smaller businesses with the infrastructure necessary to aggregate and process data coming from IoT-enabled devices.
All of this will be done with the possibility to integrate IoT data streams into their CRM service, keeping everything in the same place, just like large enterprise like their applications to be.
IoT Cloud scores its first customers in Cisco and Microsoft
The new IoT Cloud platform will be powered by Salesforce Thunder, a scalable, real-time event processing engine built on Apache Kafka, a distributed publish-subscribe (Pub/Sub) messaging system, ideal for broadcasting and processing large amounts of streaming data. Other technologies used with IoT Cloud include Apache Spark, Apache Storm, Apache Cassandra, and Heroku, a platform-as-a-service company Salesforce bought in 2010.
"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."
As SD Times is reporting, IoT Cloud already scored its first big clients by signing Cisco and Microsoft as future customers.
There are a few intro videos and a PDF presentation of Salesforce's IoT Cloud you can check out. The first public accessible version of the platform will launch in early 2016, when its pricing will also be revealed.
