平台之路

几年前，马克•贝尼奥夫(Marc Benioff)告诉我，他对开发后台办公应用程序不感兴趣，因为后者会在ERP和金融市场上与SAP和甲骨文(Oracle)竞争。很多人，包括我自己，都对这个想法表示怀疑，并大声问自己公司将如何继续发展，因为，只有前端办公室和后台办公室，没有其他的了，对吗?不。Salesforce决定做一件困难的事情，即发明一种新的应用，以支持一个组织在社区和市场中增强的作用。到目前为止，它已经开发了慈善云、非营利云、教育云，以及一系列针对垂直行业(如医疗和金融)的客户关系管理。它甚至刚刚完成了对Vlocity的收购，这家公司利用Salesforce Lightning开发和部署定制的垂直应用。在所有这些过程中，该公司将原来的CRM产品变成了一个示范项目，说明了什么是可以实现的，从某种角度来看，它是在继续使CRM商品化。但如果这是商品化的话，它的发生没有降价和利润侵蚀，当太多人已经有了社交圈的时候，你就会想到。Salesforce继续定义着企业软件市场，其创新很少有其他公司能赶上;上周举行的TrailheaDX 2020开发者大会就是一个很好的例子。像今年迄今为止的所有Salesforce活动一样，TDX被移到了网上，它从两天压缩到了六个小时。活动导演似乎很好地利用了这段时间，在现场演示中穿插了新的视频片段和一些录制的采访。

超越 CRM 的进步

TDX的重大新闻是引入了更多基于该平台构建的应用程序，并对管理员和开发人员进行了培训和支持，他们将进一步根据其独特业务的需求对其进行自定义。 Salesforce Anywhere是一种CRM解决方案，其前提是在可预见的将来，我们所有人都必须在办公室内外工作并提高工作效率。先前宣布的Work.com是一套解决方案，旨在帮助公司完成与重新开放经济相关的许多艰巨任务。这两个设置都是专门为我们所处的时代建造的。 他们告诉我，Work.com和Salesforce Anywhere在大约八周内就合并在一起了，尽管它们包含许多新功能，但它们也重新利用了基于该平台构建的CRM的许多组件。不管以哪种方式看待，这些解决方案都证明了该公司不断超越CRM，并在企业业务应用程序中占据主导地位。

Work.com似乎面向公共部门，具有联系人跟踪，应急响应管理和指挥中心等功能，可确保一切正常。但是，任何公司都将赞赏这些系统的实用性，因为它们会尝试在办公室安排健康的人，同时鼓励患有呼吸道感染的人留在家中。甚至还有一个用于重新培训员工的应用程序，以跟上不断变化的职位描述。 Salesforce Anywhere将传统的CRM功能与更大的移动性和技术相结合，即使人们不在一起，也可以帮助人们一起工作。几年后，随着工人和公司放弃通勤以更好地利用每个人的时间，我们可能会将此介绍视为主要的业务拐点。

成套视图

该套件包括”使用任何地方的销售，服务和市场”，该软件使用Salesforce 360​​并支持由云，社交，移动和人工智能支持的全球任何地方的销售，服务和营销，从而为任何行业提供个性化的体验。

‘‘成员之间随处协作”解决了成员之间距离遥远时团队凝聚力的需求，并可以使用Salesforce协作技术提供实时的团队聊天，通知，评论和视频会议。远程工作的另一部分是为员工提供服务台服务，这是通过与Tanium合作实现的，Tanium提供了服务台基础设施，并为员工提供了类似的服务和支持。

‘‘来自任何地方的数据”利用最近两次收购的Mule Soft和Tableau来实现对数据的访问和处理，以提供其他模块和工作人员可用来扩展其”任何地方的工作”成果的见解。 最后，”从任何地方都能熟练操作”都是需要的。从本质上讲，它为公司提供了一种培训设施，他们可以在其中建立Trailhead路径，以随着工作的不断变化而培训和更新工人的技能。

正如我在上面指出的那样，许多功能都来自针对当今现实而重新设计的应用，但这无关紧要。它为Salesforce提供了许多向客户提供的新功能，为这些客户提供了在困难时期保持其业务运转的方法，并继续展示该平台的价值，该平台正迅速成为公司的秘密武器。

Some years ago, Marc Benioff told me he was not interested in developing back office apps that would compete with SAP and Oracle in the ERP and finance market. Many people, myself included, looked askance at that idea and wondered out loud how the company would continue to grow because, hey, there's front office and back office and nothing else right?

Nope.

Salesforce decided to do the hard thing, to invent a new category of apps that support an organization's enhanced role in the community and the marketplace. So far, just to review, it has developed the Philanthropy Cloud, the Nonprofit Cloud, the Education Cloud, and a rash of custom CRM for vertical industries like healthcare and finance. It even just completed acquisition of Vlocity, a company that leverages Salesforce Lightning to build and deploy custom vertical apps.

In all of this the company made the original CRM product both a demonstration project for what can be and, to one way of viewing it, continues to commoditize CRM. But if this is commoditization, it's happening without the price cutting and margin erosion you expect when too many people already have hoola-hoops.

Salesforce continues to define the market for enterprise software, and more, with innovations that few others are stepping up to; the case in point is last week's TrailheaDX 2020 developers event held online.

Like all Salesforce events so far this year, TDX was moved online; and it was compressed from two days to six hours. The event directors seemed to use the time well, interspersing live presentations with new video segments and some recorded interviews.

Advancement Beyond CRM

The big news coming out of TDX was the introduction of still more apps built on the platform, and training and support for administrators and developers who will further customize them to the needs of their unique businesses.

Salesforce Anywhere is a CRM solution built on the assumption that we will all have to work and be productive in and out of the office for the foreseeable future. Work.com, previously announced, is a set of solutions designed to help companies do many of the hard things associated with reopening the economy. Both suites are built specifically for the times we live in.

They tell me that Work.com and Salesforce Anywhere were put together in about eight weeks -- and while they contain much that's new, they also repurpose many of the components of CRM built on the platform. Either way you look at it, these solutions are a testament to the company's continuing evolution beyond CRM and into a dominant position in enterprise business applications.

Work.com seems to be oriented toward the public sector with functionality for contact tracing, emergency response management, and a command center to keep it all on track. But any corporation will also appreciate these systems' utility as they try to schedule healthy people in the office while encouraging people with respiratory infections to stay home. There's even an app for reskilling the workforce to keep up with changing job descriptions.

Salesforce Anywhere combines conventional CRM functions with greater mobility and technologies to help people work together even when they aren't close together. We might see this introduction as a major business inflection point a few years down the road, as workers and companies give up on the commute to better use everyone's time.

A View of the Suite

The suite includes ‘‘Sell, service and market from anywhere,” which uses Salesforce 360 and supports selling, service, marketing from anywhere in the world supported by cloud, social, mobile and artificial intelligence to supply personalized experiences for any industry.

‘‘Collaborate from anywhere” grapples with the need for team cohesion while members are far apart and uses Salesforce collaboration technology to provide real-time team chat, notifications, comments, and video conferencing. Another part of remote working is providing help desk services to employees -- and that's met through a partnership with Tanium, which provides a help desk ticketing infrastructure and kind of looks like service and support for employees.

‘‘Data from anywhere” leverages Mule Soft and Tableau, two recent acquisitions, to enable access to data and to process it to provide insights that the other modules and workers can use to expand their ‘‘work from anywhere” efforts.

Finally, ‘‘Skill up from anywhere” is an idea that needed to happen. It essentially gives companies a training facility in which they can build Trailhead trails to train and update worker skillsets as the work of work continues to change.

As I noted above, a lot of this functionality comes from pre-existing apps repurposed for today's reality. But that shouldn't matter. It gives Salesforce a lot of new capabilities to supply to its customers, gives those customers ways to keep their businesses running in difficult times, and continues to demonstrate the value of the platform, which is rapidly turning into the company's secret sauce.