Salesforce.com World Tour (TrailBlazer) May 2017

Hello to all my Friends and followers here on LinkedIn. I would have to say that today was quite eventful at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC where once again, Salesforce.com proves to still be the 600lb Gorilla of all CRM Systems with their customer at the center of it all. From the moment I walked in at 9am you could feel the excitement of people in the lines to get their badges and anticipating to see what will be revealed from behind the "green curtain" in the Keynote room.

I'll be the first to say this on this on this openly, the canned script of Salesforce history needs to be fast forwarded about 10 years. Gone are the days of memory of Green Screen terminals and Mainframes. What? What did I just say? Bite my tongue as there are still many large scale Insurance Firms, Banking institutions and yes MutualFund and Asset Management companies that still use AS400s and other MF's for that matter, but well come back to this.

The Keynote presentation was interesting with our hosts, Amy Weaver and Tony Prophet. The story and walk through of Farmers Insurance (who I'm sure) may still have a Mainframe running in the background somewhere, has made it truly simple for people like you and I to submit a claim for help in our greatest time of need. Bravo Farmer! Having run systems for Guardian Life Insurance in my past some years back, (had Saleforce running and forced to shut it down) it's unfortunate it had not been their story. Anyway... Again, Bravo to Farmers!

One of the truly innovative things that Salesforce is doing is the partnership with IBM and integration of the Einstein functionality by leveraging IBM Watson data. This is truly great on many levels but, no matter how much data or how simple it maybe the true direction for action by your sales people is missing. That being the conversation i.e. "prescriptive sales delivery" the dialogue to help consummate a sale.

This is why I think if, somehow Salesforce was able to incorporate the capabilities of what a company name Narrative Science is doing it would be game over for any and all who may attempt to enter the CRM Gladiator arena. Narrative Science is a company based in Chicago has a product called Narratives which allows for human words, sentences and paragraphs to be created from the actual data. This process s called Natural Language Generation. It's quite amazing... and this is where Salesforce needs to go with Einstein. Here is demo of what it can do for Tableau customers and it works just as well for any Qlik customers as well. Salesforce API Integration to this product is yet to be seen. Hmmmmm..... Hence the R&D consideration of Einstein?

Ok, so off my soapbox and now and back to the show. As for Mainframes folks, they are like bridges in this country. You don't pay much attention to them but you need them to cross the river. They most likely will never go away albeit, Salesforce and the Cloud business has made things great for all of us with the simplicity of mobile "pocket computers" and declarative programming but, the question to ask is what will we be using next? Johnny Mnemonic?

All in all, I must admit it was a great day. I met some truly great people and as I mentioned if there is anyone that spoke with me today or reads this and you have a need or guidance of your possible Saleforce.com implementation please let me know. If you have the need to build out your system to gain greater ROI or you have 2 Orgs and you want to consolidate, CTI or Marketing Campaigns needs, please don't hesitate to reach-out to me as I will help you anyway that I can. Connect with me here on LinkedIn and please follow my corp page.

Your time to have read is truly appreciated. I hope you learned something. -John