Dreamforce 2015: 8 Ways Analytics Changes Business
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and a cast of thousands took the stage at Dreamforce 2015 to talk about how analytics, particularly when based on information drawn from mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), is going to change the way we do business.
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Dreamforce is an annual paean to Salesforce itself. But this year's event was also a love song to analytics. Literally.
Stevie Wonder took the keynote stage on Wednesday to sing that Dreamforce was the sunshine of his life. From there, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and a cast of thousands took the stage to talk about how analytics, particularly when based on information drawn from mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), is going to change the way we do business.
Benioff welcomed us to the Internet of Customers. What the heck does that mean? Benioff said that "Behind everything we all use -- a watch, a car, a kiosk -- behind every one of these connected things is a customer. Even though we're creating all of this data, there is a bifurcation between our customers and our enterprises."
The divide is so big that only 1% of customers have been analyzed using big data or analytics of any kind. But, according to Benioff, those days are over. Analytics driven by IoT is going to create massive customization and a one-to-one relationship with customers. He paraded customers and vendor executives onto the stage to talk about the analytics revolution and the Internet of Customers.
Here, we highlight the ways analytics will change business, as presented by eight executives on the Dreamforce 2015 keynote stage.
Benioff envisions a world of mass customization where data from the Internet of Things is entered directly into CRM applications to enable sales and marketing to respond. The technology is an IoT Cloud powered by a real-time event-processing engine called Thunder. The first customer is Microsoft. Microsoft will be taking customer data directly from online products like Windows, devices like Windows phones, and other connected devices and turning the information into actionable insights.
One of the ways Microsoft will use Thunder is to see what customers haven't done. For instance, a customer may be using Office 365, but not a complimentary product or plug-in. Microsoft marketing will be able to use that knowledge to market the new product directly to the customer.
Harris is dressed as "Lightning Man" to talk about the new Lightning interface (Lightning and Thunder, get it?) and the new SalesforceIQ. SalesforceIQ takes data from your email and calendar and uses business intelligence to suggest actions to you. For instance, it will identify potential deals ready to close based on the language in an email. It will tell you who else in your organization should be involved in a meeting by analyzing your email data to determine who knows the customer best.
Perhaps the most interesting use of Salesforce came from the Athena Breast Health Network, a collaboration of the five University of California (UC) medical centers to drive innovation in breast cancer prevention, screening, and treatment. Dr. Laura Esserman heads the Wisdom Project, a major experiment to bring personalized health to breast cancer treatment, that will drawn participants from the Athena Network.
Dr. Esserman explained that managing personalized sales data wasn't all that different from managing personalized health data. The project plans to use Salesforce to manage 100,000 health records. "I see my kids and the kind of data they have when they pick their fantasy [sports] teams," Esserman said, "Shouldn't we have that kind of data for our medical decisions? This is what we want. Moneyball for medicine."
Benioff added: "This is an example of one-on-one targeted medicine tailored totally to you. It is being created by advances in biological sciences, but also in advances in information sciences."
In a dramatization complete with fake datacenter (pictured), Chuck Robbins showed how Cisco will use a combination of its own analytics and Salesforce analytics to aid customer service technicians.
In the dramatization, a network switch is losing packets. The system notifies a service team and indicates whether this is a high priority problem. If so, the system automatically notifies service personnel, client support, and the client. When the service personnel arrive, they discover they're unfamiliar with that particular switch but are able to download tech manuals in the field. Once they fix the switch they get confirmation of the new installation. This kind of augmented reality experience will become more crucial as the Internet of Things grows.
Robbins said: "We built our company on the fact that there are 15 billion devices. Our data suggested we would have 50 billion devices by 2020, and now it looks more like 75 billion, so we like that more. We have built our business on what customers can do with the insights from those devices. We can take analytics out of our network and correlate it to the Salesforce data, and give richer data and a better customer experience."
Western Union has more outlets than Starbucks, McDonald's, and 7-11 combined. To handle more than 500,000 locations around the world, the company needs to be able to track those locations and reach out to them with quick, simple solutions. Western Union is using analytics to track underperforming stores, identify potential offerings they might be missing (such as digital kiosks), and suggest adding those offerings -- all through a simple interface.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff sat down with Travis Kalanick for a fireside chat on the future of the city and transportation. Kalanick has a dream of making transportation as reliable as running water. For everyone. Everywhere. To do that, he needs analytics to better predict demand. Check out the details on how Kalanick plans to make "all cars Uber" here.
Nadella took the stage to talk about changing the nature of work. He said he wants to make computing more human and more productive.
"When we say productivity, what I mean by that ultimately is for each of us to get more out of our lives," Nadella said. "We talk about computing everywhere and data everywhere. What is scarce is time. How can tools and services come together to give me back time so I can enjoy my work and my life?"
As an example, Nadella displayed a new feature of Microsoft Office Delve that will show you how much time you spend performing different tasks throughout your workday. It can show you how much time you spend with email, in meetings, and meeting with customers, among other personal work data.
"When you look back at this era and you try to figure out what the big technology is, it will be characterized by what we did with data," said Nadella. "The data culture is what will transform businesses."
At the end of the discussion on personalized data, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said, "I was just thinking about this concept of personalized medicine and how it effects the enterprise. We're going to take the concept of precision medicine and create precision enterprises. We're going to be looking at customers the same way as personalized medicine thinks of patients."
That's the future of analytics as Benioff sees it. Are you going to be ready for it?
At the end of the discussion on personalized data, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said, "I was just thinking about this concept of personalized medicine and how it effects the enterprise. We're going to take the concept of precision medicine and create precision enterprises. We're going to be looking at customers the same way as personalized medicine thinks of patients."
That's the future of analytics as Benioff sees it. Are you going to be ready for it?
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