Salesforce launches IoT Cloud to let business users act on big data

Cloud software company Salesforce today is announcing the release of IoT Cloud, a new service that will put the company into a new market. Think of IoT Cloud as a tool that non-technical workers can use to automatically kick off specific actions based on data from Internet-connected devices, social media messages, websites, and other sources.

“We’re really focused on how we can take all the data that’s being generated by all these devices and make it more meaningful to our customers,” Dylan Steele, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce App Cloud, told VentureBeat in an interview.

Of course, IoT Cloud can integrate with Salesforce’s existing services, like the Marketing Cloud and the Service Cloud. Just as IoT can integrate with other entities in the Salesforce portfolio, yesterday Salesforce announced that it’s more tightly integrating the Analytics Cloud with other parts of Salesforce, such as the widely used Sales Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) software.

The broad theme, of course, is that Salesforce is continuing to diversify its offerings and reduce its dependency on the CRM category. That’s why the launch of IoT Cloud is arguably the biggest news to come out of Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week. At Dreamforce last year, Salesforce officially unveiled Analytics Cloud, which was a diversifying product itself. The Financial Services Cloud and the Health Cloud represent vertical-specific diversification efforts. Prior to that, there were acquisitions in the marketing category — Buddy Media and ExactTarget — and before that, Salesforce picked up platform as a service (PaaS) cloud capability by buying Heroku.

In this case, Salesforce didn’t buy a company to get the new functionality. IoT Cloud is based on Thunder, an event-processing engine developed at Salesforce, according to a statement.

The software stands out on the basis of not requiring technical expertise. Engineers can write programs that draw on data stored in Hadoop and other repositories, but Salesforce is making this tooling more accessible.

Even so, Salesforce is capitalizing on the continuing marketing buzz around the Internet of Things (IoT), an area where GE and other technology companies have been launching tools and announcing partnerships.

Salesforce is partnering with ARM, Etherios, Informatica, PTC’s ThingWorx, and Xively by LogMeIn for the launch of IoT Cloud.