What Matters to HfS at Dreamforce ’15

As the much of the sales, marketing and service world gets ready to descend on San Francisco for Dreamforce ’15, September 15-18, 2015, in San Francisco, it seemed appropriate to share some of the topics that HfS will be looking to explore during our time at the event.

It’s such a huge event that we really wanted to be focused in our pre-event planning this year. During our time in the Moscone Center, in hotel conference rooms, theatre venues and, yes, even on “The Dreamboat” we will be talking to enterprise buyers, service providers and Salesforce employees testing out our views about where the digital world of sales, marketing, service and analytics is headed. Much of this research is in support of our forthcoming HfS Blueprint on Salesforce Services, which we will publish in October 2015. But you won’t have to wait until October to get a taste of our point of view because we’ll also be providing HfS Soundbite updates during and after Dreamforce.

The first topic we’re focused on is the proliferation of new vertical solutions built around multiple Salesforce applications. Whether FullForce certified, Vlocity partnerships, start-ups or part of the offering portfolio of the Salesforce service providers, this is one of the hottest current trends in the Salesforce ecosystem.   Every service provider we interviewed during our Blueprint process has dedicated significant time to their new vertical solutions. We intend to see even more of them in person next week as well to assess what is real and what is differentiated and meeting enterprise buyer requirements.

We are also paying attention to the integration of devices and data from the Internet of Things (IoT) into the Salesforce ecosystem this year. In particular, we want to seek out some of the best examples of IoT and Service Cloud integration and the analytics and insight opportunities that are being created for leading enterprises.

Intelligent Automation is one of the core HfS research topics and it is still emerging around SaaS platforms, as we recently wrote about in Why SaaS Vendors Need A Definitive RPA Strategy. Automation isn’t only applicable to processes built around legacy applications, so we’ll be working the floors of Dreamforce to look for solutions to further automate sales, marketing and service processes in the enterprise and in BPOs as well.

Finally, HfS also wants to look at many of the newest solutions built around Force.com to assess the state of innovation around Platform As a Service. This has been a source of considerable differentiation in our Blueprint research so far, but there are many more solutions here still to be uncovered and understood.

All in all, it will be a very busy time in San Francisco. But the level of innovation occurring around Salesforce and the way it is helping to usher in the As-a-Service Economy means it will be a very fruitful few days as well.

HfS will be spending our time at Dreamforce ’15 looking at trends in: vertical solutions, integration of IoT into Salesforce products, automation tools and methodologies for Salesforce delivered processes and at new uses cases for Force.com platforms.