San Francisco based CRM giant Salesforce has been one of the early tech adopters. They always look ahead to the next big things in mobile, social, digital, cloud, IoT and AI. In a recent interview with Business Insider’s Julie Bort, Salesforce’s co-founders Marc Benioff and Parker Harris told how their company is working on one of the revolutionary technologies “Blockchain” to build a product.
During their talk with Business Insider, Benioff told at the time of his participation in the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, he started thinking about blockchain & how it can help building Salesforce products. At the same time, there was a crypto conference going on & Benioff got an opportunity to chat with one of the attendees. After his interaction, he started visualizing a blockchain based Salesforce product.
Benioff said: “I had been thinking a lot about what is Salesforce’s strategy around blockchain, and what is Salesforce’s strategies around cryptocurrencies and how will we relate to all of these things. I am actually a big believer in the power of serendipity, and I said just by having that conversation, it started me down the road to thinking more seriously about Salesforce’s role in this developing technology. He added, the more I thought about it, the more I believed that Salesforce could make use of Blockchain. Then suddenly something clicked for me and I saw a way to put blockchain and cryptocurrencies to work in Salesforce. That’s kind of how it works and I hope by Dreamforce we will have a blockchain and cryptocurrency solution.”
Benioff is a visionary person & the small conversation with that attendee in that event in Switzerland on blockchain made him identify an opportunity to expand Salesforce in the blockchain direction. Benioff said there are many ideas in his mind and he can execute most of them, but what’s important is to understand what is important for Salesforce customers.
Blockchain has transformed the financial sector and it created a more productive ecosystem where customers got a chance to participate in the value they create. Previously blockchain was limited to an electronic ledger used to track cryptocurrencies, but with time it has a more general business role. As an immutable record, it can track anything of value. Dreamforce is Salesforce’s annual customer conference, which will be held this year in San Francisco from September 25-28 and we can expect the big announcement of a blockchain product this year.