Salesforce unveils Field Service Lightning, a new cloud service launching in Q2 2016

Enterprise software company Salesforce today announced several updates for its product portfolio, including the launch of a new service called Field Service Lightning and the planned delivery of the Lightning redesign for its core Sales Cloud and Service Cloud services.

The biggest news of the day, unveiled at a major corporate event in San Francisco to kick off Salesforce’s 2017 fiscal year, is a new product called Field Service Lightning. Oracle acquired cloud-based field service software company TOA Technologies in 2014, and last summer Microsoft announced its acquisition of field service software company FieldOne. Now Salesforce is getting active. But Salesforce appears to have built its own technology for this area. From the statement on the news:

Organizations can connect their entire service workforce with tools for agents, dispatchers, and mobile employees, giving customers a seamless experience. Dispatchers can leverage smart scheduling to provide automatic, real-time assignments based on employee skills, availability, and location. Service employees in the field are able to create and update work orders, and can also change requests and job status from any device, making them more productive than ever.

Field Service Lightning will become generally available for Service Cloud customers in the second quarter of this year, according to the statement. Pricing information is not yet available.

The introduction of the service demonstrates Salesforce’s continuing willingness to move into new markets and expand its capabilities and business potential. Other recent market expansions include the Salesforce Analytics Cloud and the Financial Services Cloud.

Salesforce is swapping out its Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Unlimited Edition for both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud — and it’s replacing those three product tiers with Lightning Professional Edition, Lightning Enterprise Edition, and Lightning Unlimited Edition for the two clouds. The three new products will become available for $75, $150, and $300 per user per month, respectively, in the second quarter of 2016, the statement said.
A few products are now generally available:

• Now that Salesforce’s acquisition of quote-to-cash software company SteelBrick has closed, the Salesforce SteelBrick CPQ service costs $40 per user per month.
• The SalesforceIQ Inbox, based on technology from the RelateIQ acquisition, costs $25 per user per month for companies already using Sales Cloud.
• The Sales Wave App costs $75 per user per month for Sales Cloud customers.

Salesforce will offer Lightning Voice — a package with features like auto-logging for calls, call forwarding, and click-to-call — to Sales Cloud customers in beta in the second quarter of 2016. Salesforce will provide pricing information for it later.