Earlier this week, Salesforce gave us all a sneak peek into what we can expect from Spring ‘16, and it did not disappoint.
According to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Salesforce is now the fourth largest enterprise software company in the world. Last year, it was named to the Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. companies.
In case you missed Tuesday’s corporate and product strategy preview, here are the highlights and top takeaways for Salesforce’s 49th major release.
Salesforce Spring ‘16 Broadcast Highlights
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff reflected on the journey to where Salesforce is today:
1. “This idea that we would build the world’s first multitenant cloud for enterprise software — a shared infrastructure for our customers — to help them go faster than ever before. That was amazing.”
2. “We’ve seen our customers exceed our expectations when it’s come to their own revenue growth.”
Newly appointed COO Keith Block discussed building customer-centric companies and operating businesses on mobile platforms:
3. “We live in a world where everyone and everything is smarter. That means you have to get smarter about your customers. ”
4. “All customers want to to be able to conduct business with companies in the manner in which they live their daily lives — by leveraging this technology.
5. “This is the world we live in — the age of the customer is where everyone and everything and everybody is connected.”
6. “We are all walking around with a very powerful computer, and it’s just going to get more powerful.”
7. “At Salesforce, every one of us runs our business on our phone.”
8. “Run your business from your phone. Empower your employees. Empower your decision making. It’s right at your fingertips. And it’s at the speed of light.”
Many companies are indeed doing business on their mobile phones, but Salesforce President of Products Alex Dayon added that it creates a fractured experience and discussed what developers can do about it:
9. “This is a very fragmented world of devices. Is the tablet a phone or a computer? All of those devices are converging. And we need to build a platform for converging this fragmented user experience.”
10. “Every developer needs to build new apps that are targeting this environment. And of course, it needs to be a platform of innovation and make sure all these apps work together.”
11. “At Dreamforce, we unveiled the lightning platform. Lightning platform is really one platform and one experience across many devices.
12. “The Lightning Builder enables and empowers developers to be able to quickly build applications.”
Finally, Dayon talked about some exciting new features with tomorrow’s release:
13. “Today, we’re here to launch our first Lightning App, which is Sales Cloud Lightning. This is our leading Sales Cloud sales application reinvented.”
14. “[Spring ‘16] delivers a brand new version of our Sales Cloud, our leading application. It’s actually coming with more than 20 new Lightning components, new analytical apps, new mobile apps and new extensions.”
And Sarah Patterson, the SVP of Product Marketing for Service Cloud at Salesforce, added a few, as well:
15. “[Using Salesforce Voice], right within Sales Cloud I can make that call. But more important, I’m being prompted to make that call in real time.”
16. “We now have full lead to cash on the Salesforce platform [with acquisition of CPQ software company Steelbrick].”
Many Salesforce customers will get to see these upgrades as early as tomorrow. Everyone else can expect to seem them during the final release weekend February 12 and 13.
And keep an eye out for Salesforce’s 50th major release this summer.
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