Dreaming of a Single Truth

It was Dreamforce last week. Salesforce's annual mega conference dominated San Francisco in the build up to thanksgiving. Amidst all the celebrity guests, talk of philanthropy, and doubling annual revenue, the main topic of conversation was integration and data unification. Salesforce has long led the industry, promoting the latest trends months or years before anyone else. This time feels different. A lot of good stuff was announced at the show, but none of it was totally new. Salesforce are facing the same problems as everyone else, and are using broadly the same solution to solve them. The main topics and announcements from the show were much the same as the Adobe and Oracle conferences in the spring.

Perhaps the most revolutionary thing was Salesforce's willingness to announce alliances and integrations with their competitors. Over the last few years, it has often felt as though the company has gone out of the way to block integrations between the Salesforce Cloud and competing ecosystems. There is a thriving developer ecosystem, but it all puts Sales Cloud at the heart of the enterprise technology stack. Anything that threatens that position has been blocked. Integrations with Microsoft and Adobe have been dialled back where possible.

Friends and Allies

At Dreamforce that changed. The Orwellian sounding Customer 360 Truth was the big announcement, and single source of truth was the big buzz phrase. The Sales objective is to use last year's Mulesoft acquisition to bring in all the enterprise data not already stored in the Salesforce ecosystem. It's not surprising really: Salesforce have a CDP to promote, and in that area they're behind the curve. Oracle and Adobe both launched their CDPs back in the spring.

At the heart of this strategy is the Cloud Information Model (CIM), a multi-cloud, cross-platform data structure that standardises the way apps use and store data so that it can be accessed and updated by other applications without problems. The goal of CIM is to break down data silos and make it easier to integrate applications. Naturally, the foundation of the CIM is Salesforce and it's Mulesoft powered integration cloud in particular.

Enhancing interoperability of cloud applications is a long overdue goal. Many apps make it very difficult to access the data they contain from other systems, which causes major fragmentation challenges in every business. Efforts to simplify shifting data between apps will make data-driven reporting and decision making much easier, but only if apps actually adopt the standard. The omens on that one don't look good. Microsoft, Adobe and SAP already have a competing initiative called the Open Data Initiative (ODI) which does much the same thing and has much the same goals. The CIM has Amazon on-board, which is significant but doesn't address the fact that two competing data interoperability standards do not actually do anything to address the underlying problem they're trying to solve. The Salesforce version is open source, which will increase adoption but probably not to the level where it becomes an industry standard.

The New Platform

In the meantime, the CIM has become the foundation for Salesforce's new CDP. The brand new Customer 360 platform gained some new capabilities at this conference that help expand its feature set beyond the limited scope of last year's unveiling. Smartly, Salesforce have chosen to separately brand each aspect of the product's capability which will help enormously in selling the new platform to customers. There is still a fair amount of confusion surrounding what CDPs are and what they do that can be alleviated by splitting out the product feature set. Not all of Customer 360's pillars are new though, Salesforce Identity has been brought into the new platform. As have many of the company's investments in no-code app creation, blockchain and AI. In effect, the Salesforce platform portfolio has been rebranded as the Customer 360 Platform.

The new stuff is all part of Customer 360 Truth, which covers the single customer view capabilities announced last year as well as the new CDP. Truth has three pillars: Data Manager, Audience and Identity for Customers. The first two pillars map closely to the capabilities of competing products. Integrating Identity into Truth is new though, allowing customers to login into CIM and Salesforce apps using their social media profiles. The most obvious use case for this is Salesforce Communities, but customer-facing Business apps built on top of the Salesforce platform will benefit too. Microsoft, Google and others have competing identity management solutions as part of their cloud portfolios, but no-one has integrated those capabilities into a CDP.

A New Take

Identity is not the only differentiator for Customer 360 Truth. Typically, CDPs are designed to be used by developers and data analysts. Many of the market leaders are intended to be accessed by code through developer APIs, rather than using a user interface. Salesforce have rejected this approach, which is not surprising given their No Code heritage. As such, Salesforce have been able to get marketers and journalists to understand the purpose of their CDP far more easily than competitors. In this area, the demos do look impressive.

The main two pillars of Customer 360 Truth are easy to understand. Data Manager is the integration layer of the CDP, ingesting all your customer data from across the business into a single, unified customer profile. The integration technologies acquired from Mulesoft have been leveraged to simplify and enhance the many integrations required as well as in unifying any conflicting data sources. The resulting customer profiles are then viewed and utilised using the Audiences module of Customer 360 Truth. The primary purpose of a CDP is to build marketing audiences from the aggregated profile and activity information collected from the various data sources feeding the database. Audiences does this. The resulting groups of contacts can then be streamed into any integrated application as well as the rest of the Salesforce Cloud portfolio for downstream execution, for example, they can be added as telemarketing campaign members in Sales Cloud or to an email list in Pardot.

In this respect, Salesforce have not announced anything new or revolutionary. If anything, they're behind the curve. Customer 360 Truth won't launch until 2020, whereas most of their competitors already have a product in market. For companies already deeply embedded in the Salesforce ecosystem, there is enough differentiation wait for Truth rather than evaluate existing CDP offerings. Where Salesforce have made a real difference is the messaging. They've been able to explain the purpose and functions of a CDP for B2B in a way that I've not seen any other vendor do. In part, this is because they're targeting the product at a far less technical audience than many other CDP vendors. That in itself is valuable. CDPs are a big deal that solves some marketers' biggest challenges, so it's about time Salesforce get into the act. If they're going to meet their ambitious revenue expansion targets, they need Customer 360 to be a success.