CEO Benioff Touts Salesforce Customer 360 Work-From-Anywhere Capabilities

Salesforce is focused on working from anywhere with its latest Cloud 3.0 innovations, including the Saleforce Customer 360 platform and Hyperforce.

The company highlighted its latest innovations during Tuesday’s Salesforce World Tour live from Singapore. Salesforce last month announced it is buying Slack for $27.7 billion. The combination will create a unified platform for connecting employees, customers and partners, and the apps they use.

Marc Benioff is Salesforce’s chair and CEO. He said Salesforce revenue last year was more than $21 billion. He expects that to exceed $25.5 billion this year.

Salesforce’s Marc Benioff

“We’re rebuilding all of our architecture, all of our capabilities in two fundamental ways,” he said. “First, we’re completely Slack-first, so that we’re 100% work from anywhere. And two, Hyperforce. We rebuilt our architecture onto an incredible new platform called Hyperforce that allowed us to run our core platform on any hyperscale or data center so that our customers could choose where they wanted to manage their data. Yes, we continue to double down on the experience of the applications and on the correlatives applications, and delivering of that single source of truth. But we are ultimately focused on delivering what we call the operating system for Cloud 3.0.”

Saleforce Customer 360 is a customer identity management platform.

Radical Pivot

Salesforce can deliver an entirely new capability to customers that lets them be successful from anywhere, Benioff said. And Slack is the collaboration, work-from-anywhere frame.

“So this is a radical pivot for us,” he said. “This is not the presentation we gave a year ago and it wasn’t the presentation we needed to give a year ago. But today, this is the presentation that we need to give today. This is why we’re making aggressive changes to Salesforce to be even more relevant to our customers in this incredible time. And that is what is accelerating us. And that’s also what’s motivating us and inspiring us.”

With COVID-19 and vaccine management, Salesforce has to pivot to deliver a new generation of technology and “we need to be able to do it right now, and we are,” Benioff said.

“We realize that no matter what industry we are operated in, we’re going to have to deliver an incredibly new solution because our customers’ needs are very different than they were even just one year ago,” he said. “It’s a new future and we all have a new beginner’s mind. And in our beginner’s mind, we can now see the things that we have to deliver and the values that we have to operate from. It’s different. We have to look at where is the future working. Salesforce is where the future works.”

‘Robust’ Partner Ecosystem

Brett Taylor is Salesforce‘s president and CEO. He said Salesforce has the “most robust” partner ecosystem in the industry.

“We want to show up with all of the partners you use in your technology platforms and show up together to make you successful,” he said.

Taylor said Salesforce Customer 360 is the “operating system for growth in this all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.”

“With Customer 360, you can sell from anywhere,” he said. “And whether your contact center is a building or just exists in a cloud, you can service from anywhere. You can market digitally from anywhere. You can do e-commerce from anywhere.”

Meantime, Salesforce Tableau analytics helps organizations understand data generated from digital interactions, Taylor said.

Hyperforce and Slack

Hyperforce is the foundation of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, Taylor said. It allows Salesforce to be deployed on public cloud.

“We’re not building our own data centers anymore,” he said. “This is a big change for us. This means we can meet your customers where they are. Hyperforce is already live in India and Germany, and it’s going live in 10 new regions in the next year.”

In a world where employees and partners are working from anywhere, and customers are engaging you from anywhere, “Slack plus Customer 360 is the way to succeed in the new normal,” Taylor said.