The CEO of Salesforce has predicted major changes in how businesses around the world operate and grow in the post-pandemic world.
Speaking at the opening keynote of the company’s first-ever virtual Dreamforce conference from San Francisco, Marc Benioff hailed the success of the past year.
“There's never been an enterprise software company that has grown so fast,” he noted, highlighting that the company is on track to record revenues of $25.5bn next year, whilst also supporting 4.2m jobs across the world in the wider 'Salesforce economy'.
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Slack deal
Unsurprisingly, Benioff was keen to focus on the company’s recent $28bn acquisition of Slack, a move that he said would provide, “a comprehensive interface to all our products.”
“We've always had the vision of the social enterprise at Salesforce,” he added, “we've always been dedicated to the vision of what a collaborative interface, a highly-productive interface would look like.”
Benioff was joined on stage by Slack CEO and founder Stewart Butterfield, who was also keen to highlight the work Salesforce had done in pushing the cloud technology world forward.
The Slack chief pointed out that his platform was the ideal tool to help bring together the various technological layers seen in many businesses today, connecting the work of machines with the human conversations that influence their work.
“Slack, I think, has done a great job in taking that conversational level - the context, the decision making - and bringing it to the applications,” Butterfield said. “You put those all together and you really have the opportunity for end-to-end digital transformation and that's what's really exciting.”
“We’re absolutely going to be working from everywhere,” he added, ““This moment is one that we will remember a couple decades from now...I think this is a pivotal moment and the opportunity to really transform the way that we work, so that we're not as reliant on the physical address, that we can have a digital HQ.”
Hyperforce
Following on from Butterfield, Salesforce CTO Bret Taylor was next on stage, noting that with regards to Slack, “there could not be a more relevant tool this year...everything is going through tools like Slack, everything has gone digital overnight.t.”
“We are in an all-digital, work anywhere world...I think we're living the future right now,” Taylor added.
"This year is all about change - we have gone digital overnight...let’s be honest, it's 2020 - if you don't have a digital business, you don't have a business.”
In order to support these increasingly-digital businesses, Taylor unveiled the launch of Salesforce Hyperforce. This new offering puts the Salesforce 360 software suite on all major public clouds, making it easier for businesses of all sizes to move to digital.
“We have been working for the past two years on probably the most significant technological shift in this platform since (Salesforce) created it over 21 years ago,” Taylor noted. ”Simply put, we've been working to enable us to deliver Salesforce on public cloud infrastructure all around the world…We've had to completely re-architect Salesforce to work in this way.”
“If you have a B2B company with 10,000 customers or you're a B2C customer with 100 million or more consumers, you can now use Salesforce as your single source of truth for all of that data.”
With such a strong new field of offerings, Salesforce’s boasting looks set to pay off, especially if it can ensure Slack’s strong customer base stays engaged and connected in the newly digital world.
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