As big companies increasingly purchase digital products for both old systems and new technologies, the scramble by cloud providers is heating up for their business.
One such operator, the giant software company Salesforce, launched two new cloud products this week aimed at the manufacturing and consumer goods sectors, taking on Microsoft, SAP. Oracle and others.
Salesforce, the leading software-as-a-service provider, already counts clients in most sectors that use its customer relationship management and customer serviceOpens a new window platforms.
Now it’s doubling down on a drive to tailor products for specific industry verticalsOpens a new window , and so far has rolled out such platforms for finance, healthcare, media, nonprofit and retail companies.
Building a Unified Profile
Its latest products, the Manufacturing Cloud and Consumer Goods Cloud, aim at the manufacturing and consumer goods sectors.
Both are part of Salesforce’s Customer 360 tool. It allows companies to connect any app, data source or device across any cloud service or on-premises server to build a unified profile of each customer and deliver customized services.
The Manufacturing Cloud brings sales and operations teams together to better forecast, plan and assess customer and market performance.
“The manufacturing cloud bridges the gap between sales and operations teams,†says Cindy Bolt, a Salesforce senior vice president, “while ensuring more predictive and transparent business so they can build deeper, trusted relationships with their customers.â€
It effectively works as a software layer, drawing data from a company’s other systems – such as enterprise resource planning and order management. It controls the costs, such as running a warehouse, collating sales agreements and forecasting tools. And it ships with the Einstein Analytics tool, Salesforce’s proprietary predictive analytics and AI software.
Altogether, the Manufacturing Cloud arguably represents the most tightly integrated product release of Salesforce and MuleSoft, the API integration specialist it bought last year for $6.5 billion.
Aimed at Field Reps
The Consumer Goods Cloud, meanwhile, aims at field reps who work for brick-and-mortar retail businesses. It’s packed with toolsets intended to streamline store operations by ensuring products are in stock and pricing and promotions are aligned with corporate expectations.
The tool helps reps organize route visits to inspect inventories, return orders, perform surveys and other functions.
The Customer Goods Cloud also employs the Einstein Vision image recognition and detection product to assist with inventory and merchandising compliance checks.
Competing Clouds
While Salesforce recently reported second quarter revenue of $4 billion, up 22% year-on-year, it also saw a slowdown in growth in its original sales software.
Like many other software companies, it has diversified beyond its core of cloud-based tools for sales and marketing teams to expand into a large and acquisitive software group.
Salesforce’s 2018 purchase of MuleSoft helped move it into data integration. Then last month, it joined top rivals by jumping into the data visualization area, buying the big data company Tableau for $15.3 billion, its largest deal yet.
The MuleSoft purchase came a few days after Google said it was buying the big data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion. Microsoft’s Power BI business intelligence data analytics offering is a rival to Tableau’s, and Amazon Web Services also has a product.
Salesforce’s latest move can be seen as a competitive strike at other operators. Sysco, the food service company, has built a product tailored for the consumer goods market, as has Atlatl Software for manufacturing, while Microsoft and SAP are also aiming for similar areas.
About 84% of enterprises have adopted a multicloud strategy, with half of those surveyed spending more than $1 million on the public cloud, according to the “RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud†report by Flexera. The lion’s share of increased spending by IT departments was going to Microsoft Azure, which is fast catching up to AWS.