Salesforce brings the power of predictive analytics to businesses

Deepak Pargaonkar, Senior Director – Solutions Engineering, Salesforce India tells VARINDIA of the journey that Salesforce has traversed in the country and how it has adopted AI to move its customers to the next level of transformation - 
 

Marc Benioff founded Salesforce on the basis of very simple principles. He observed that enterprise applications are complex, difficult to deploy and takes time to implement. His vision was to make application buying as simple as buying a book on Amazon. With that concept he introduced a disruption around cloud computing for enterprises and that’s when Salesforce came into existence.

“Salesforce was born on cloud,” says Deepak Pargaonkar, Senior Director – Solutions Engineering, Salesforce India. “Started in 1999, the value proposition of the Salesforce solution was very appealing and compelling. Over the last 18 years, Salesforce has done quite a bit in areas of innovation, customer success and philanthropy. This led to its huge adoption. Fast forward to 2017, we have globally 1, 50,000 customers. Today the organization is more than $8 billion organization. By the end of the financial year, it is possibly going to be a $10 billion organization, the fastest company to reach this mark. It’s the 4th largest enterprise software company in 18 years of its existence.” 

Salesforce gives the ability to its customers to connect with their customers in a whole new way.  Today’s consumers are changing, and so are their expectations. Besides technology has hugely disrupted the world today. Under such circumstances, the organization has to adapt to such expectations of B2B as well as B2C customers. Salesforce has a comprehensive portfolio of solution platform catering to the needs of sales, service, marketing, IoT, Social, analytics and Artificial Intelligence and its customers are using these solutions to transform their business. 

India – a focused market for Salesforce...
India is one of the important markets for Salesforce. It has been present in India for more than 10 years now. 

 “India is a focused market for Salesforce. As the country embraces digital transformation, we are there to help our customers transform their business and be an important part in the Indian ecosystem. It is in fact one of the great markets for us; we have made great investments in our Hyderabad Center of Excellence,” reiterates Deepak. 

Salesforce has key customers in India across the geography – in north, south, the west and across all the verticals and across all segments. “So you talk about financial services, IT-ITeS, manufacturing as well as the new age e-commerce, we are present everywhere. It may even be large enterprises or mid-market customers or they might small SMB customers too,” he says.  

The mushrooming of e-commerce sites has been a big game changer moment for Salesforce. “eCommerce is changing the way in which lot of things are happening. Customer retail buying habits, shopping or even other things are changing. There are a lot of innovative companies that are coming up to create a marketplace or ecommerce sites. Any ecommerce site has 2 major aspects – supply side where they have lot of vendors who are interested in selling their products and the services part in which customers like us buy these products and vendors manage the service aspects of the customers. These ecommerce companies are leveraging Salesforce to manage the journeys of their suppliers and vendors as well as connecting the latter with the customers for any kind of marketing initiatives and manage their relationships with important stakeholders,” he says.  

Growth of Artificial Intelligence...
Artificial intelligence has now become a part of our day to day life. Salesforce is bringing the power of AI to all its business stakeholders through the introduction of a comprehensive AI called Einstein. Salesforce Einstein is a comprehensive AI for CRM and is an integrated set of AI technologies that makes the Customer Success Platform smarter. 

“Sales people in an organization will get the power of AI to make them smarter,” explains Deepak. “Say I am a salesperson, and out of the 100 leads, I am told that these 20 are the leads that I should work on, because they have the higher probability of getting a faster response. Einstein works in the background and tells a salesman of where to focus on. This is the intelligence that Einstein is bringing in the lives of business stakeholders that address customer requirements in an appropriate and timely manner and delight the customer.” 

If a company had to do this on their own, they would need a lot of data, had to write algorithms, take the help of many data scientists and then come out with the output and deliver. Salesforce is doing all these jobs and at the same time providing the customers a platform that can leverage AI and build intelligent apps on it.

And so...
There are a lot of digital transformations happening. There is not a particular vertical that has not embraced this innovation, but the transformation is happening across verticals. Leveraging this opportunity Salesforce has positioned itself well to address its customers’ needs and help them with a seamless transformation with the help of its technology. 

Samrita Baruah
samrita@varindia.com