Can Salesforce.com Deliver the Complex Business Processes it Aspires To?

It is quite tough to toil through mega-conferences similar to Dreamforce. One of the factors is sheer girth of Salesforce.com. The company has now become a more complicated as well as multi-faceted. This might turn out to be much for a single conference. Irrespective of this, Dreamforce is an example of the wish why one cannot listen to all the favourite bands on one single stage. The volume that is required to fill the stage will overpower the undertones as well as overtones that make music very much a rich listening experience. However, with all of them on a single stage, the listener will need to himself sort out the sounds that would have become noises eventually.

There was a similar case with Dreamforce this year. There were several powerful undertones as well as overtones that could have been paid attention to in spite of the disturbing chatter that was generated by people like Hilary Clinton, Tony Robbins, Wil.i.am, Eckhart Tolle, Al Gore and many others who were not from technical background, which added to the cacophony at Dreamforce. Salesforce.com’s market position is that of a company that offers solutions to many requirements. This was evident through several presentations that were attended and discussed. This was also one of the most powerful undertones that played in the background at Dreamforce. When one listened carefully to this, one had to filter out the noise and detect functionality, aspirations and technology that defined the coming years of Salesforce.com.

Dreamforce is best considered as a battleground that becomes the future of the company as well as its competitors. It should have supported complicated business processes that spread across functionality like CRM, SCM, ERP, HRMS and others as well as deployment functions viz. public cloud, on-premise, hybrid and private cloud. All this make up not only the present but also the future of the modern enterprise. The continuous growth of Salesforce.com in the field of CRM, marketing automation and others are quite interesting, especially for the short-range investors who bought the idea of Salesforce.com’s P/E ratio of 70+. Salesforce.com need to achieve much more important things if that ratio becomes true, even remotely.

Things that need to be achieved by Salesforce.com do not have much co-relation to the core customer and marketing automation of the company. It is much more related with the future that will be defined by the ability of Salesforce.com to be the vendor for supplying connectivity, business context and infrastructure that will be able to support the complicated business processes, which define enterprise innovation at present. Salesforce.com has aspirations that are much more than this. The company is moving ahead for offering solutions. Like many vendors who are in this race, even Salesforce.com requires obvious strengths and some lacunae for overcoming before the undertones become a major pattern. And an apt example of this complicated business opportunity is in the next generation Enterprise Asset Management, also known as EAM. It is set to become a major revolution that will absorb the best parts of industrial internet and blend it with the latest things in talent management, direct materials procurement, operations analysis and even customer service management.