Share this Post
By Megan Bozman
Cisco and Salesforce announced a strategic alliance in a press release on Thursday. According to CRN, partners are “pumped” about it.
Before reading further, I would not have thought this relevant to IoT. Although I’m quite familiar with salesforce automation in general and the Salesforce platform in particular, I wasn’t aware of the Salesforce IoT use case. Turns out it’s rather fascinating.
According to the release, “The two companies will jointly develop and market solutions that join Cisco’s collaboration, IoT and contact center platforms with Salesforce Sales Cloud, IoT Cloud and Service Cloud.
“Cisco Jasper and the Salesforce IoT Cloud will integrate to provide visibility, control and recommended customer actions for connected devices, providing businesses with a more comprehensive and intelligent view of their IoT services.”
IoT: Not Just Gathering Data
A recent blog by Adam Bosworth, EVP, Salesforce IoT Cloud, provides great insight on the Salesforce IoT Cloud offering. “[IoT devices] generate massive amounts of data and companies have started to capture and store billions of data events every day. But storing it isn’t enough. This revolution is about proactively engaging computers and people to resolve issues or grab opportunities. Responses must be intelligent, actionable, personal, and in real-time.”
Indeed, as I’ve stated with my ‘tree falls’ analogy; gathering data that’s not subsequently put to use benefits no one. And Mr. Bosworth points out that, unfortunately, putting data to use is not the norm.
“We want to empower every business user and analyst to solve big problems around big data too… That is why we built Salesforce IoT Cloud. It’s powered by Thunder, a massively scalable, real-time processing engine. This technology makes it possible to do three really big things:
- Listen to the world at IoT scale
- Trigger actions with real-time rules
- Use the power of Salesforce to proactively engage”
Cisco IoT Solutions
As the press release states, “together, these solutions will empower companies to quickly and cost-effectively leverage billions of IoT data points to…”
Exactly. Not just gathering, but making use of IoT data.
The two companies gave the example of a fleet of trucks connected with IoT devices managed by Cisco Jasper passing data back to the Salesforce IoT cloud, where a business can provide customers real-time delivery updates or maintenance alerts.
Cisco solidified its move into the IoT market in back February by acquiring Jasper Technologies,’ provider of a cloud-based IoT service platform that enables companies to launch, manage and monetize IoT services – from cars to jet engines to implanted pacemakers.
The new IoT integrations are expected to be available in the second half of 2017 and pricing will be announced at that time.
