Why The Salesforce’s First Blockchain Plunge Is Set To Involve Development Tools?

Salesforce And The Blockchain

Here is what the Salesforce chairman Marc Benioff mentioned that perhaps it is for the first time that with interest in the blockchain, it was not known at the time if he was seriously interested or in case Salesforce was indeed offering a way to use the blockchain on the platform of Salesforce. Thereby the company announced its first blockchain product aiming squarely at developers. In this context with new tech, Salesforce’s MO is always starting slow and branching out after it gets a feel for customer requirements as the announcements have followed a similar path announcing a low-code blockchain development tool on the Lightning platform. For now, it is important to note that it is only available to select design partners as it won’t become generally available until sometime later. 

Thereafter the company has begun looking at how it could incorporate blockchain into Salesforce using it to take advantage of gaps in the CRM platform even if it made sense to as about this time Benioff was making the first public statements about blockchain. According to Adam Caplan, the SVP of the emerging technology at Salesforce, is it that this technology was looking for a problem to solve as it could drive big business impact? Salesforce, therefore, realized that after talking to 100 customers there was something there and felt like they could help companies as they work with partners outside the organization. 

Thereafter it could help companies collaborate in a trusted environment. Moving on as Caplan says the customers had begun experimenting with the idea which is of working in trusted environments as the immutable records along with other distributed ledger concepts whereas most were stuck in Proof of Concept stages looking for a way to streamline the application development process. As Bret Taylor, the president and chief product officer at Salesforce put it the company is focusing on how the decentralized nature of blockchain opening up new business models that might not have been possible on the salesforce platform earlier. 

As Taylor explains, they love the idea of extending the CRM along with this capability as it does enable multiple parties to work together in a trusted way creating business models around ecosystems rather than just direct customer relationships. He further notes that the company was going for developers as initial entrée into the blockchain helping customers get going with it thereby in a fairly quick way as it was abstracting a lot of the complexity associated with developing blockchain application. 

Salesforce In The CRM Ecosystem

Owning the CRM consultancy CRM Essentials, Brent Leary is seeing a lot of potential with the new blockchain tools as even though he cautions it is still very early. As he explains, the concept which is leveraging blockchain technology allowing companies to decentralize data with CRM data can be potentially big. Here Salesforce has the resources and mindshare to bring the large customer base as even though it won’t be available for a while and enterprise customers with huge scale to blockchain and speeding up the adoption process. 

Consisting of the three components is the new product that is: Blockchain builder helping developers build blockchain applications, Blockchain Connect integrating blockchain actions directly with applications on the Salesforce platform, as well as Blockchain Engage inviting parties to the blockchain application as they are regardless of whether they are part of the Salesforce ecosystem or not. 

It is here that Taylor comments they think having the Salesforce gravity to be around the customer and customer experience making blockchain accessible to the broad range of developers helping enable a lot of the customers starting to experiment with new business models as the new approaches are building ecosystems around their products and experiences. 

Concluding On The Popularity Of Salesforce

As Salesforce continues implementing the blockchain technology with developer tools, many tech-savvy enthusiasts are experimenting it on their applications. This is why as Salesforce is targeting the growing numbers of the developers ready for anything to culture their interests and abilities. Adding to this is the growing crop of blockchain applications promising a bright future for developers and investors alike. Why then should we vote for decentralization, when there is a lot to be observed in the ecosystem of blockchain. When we have full information on the applications developed on the blockchain, we insist on investing in them as the developers are more concerned about evolving technology more than anything else.