SAVO Group, the leading provider of enterprise-grade sales enablement solutions, has opened new doors at the Merchandise Mart today, making themselves one step closer to the Chicago Tech hub.
SAVO, a leader in the sales enablement market has pioneered the sales enablement category and currently leads the consolidation of the space. SAVO provides an insightful, prescriptive and secure sales enablement platform for global use, delivering content to sellers within the context of their selling situation.
The move is just one of a series of initiatives taken by the company to drive technology advancements. In the last 18 months, SAVO has rebuilt its entire operating platform, combining deep insights as the pioneer of sales enablement with a modern technology platform. A new analytics platform will be unveiled later this summer and the company has led the consolidation of the sales enablement space with the recent acquisition of KnowledgeTree. The acquisition brings advanced technology in predictive analytics in-house while also providing a new entry point to sales enablement.
SAVO sought space closer to Chicago’s larger tech initiatives, opting for the Mart as the adjacency of technology and smart design aligns with SAVO’s values and directions.
Jason Liu
“The move to the Mart is another step in a series of strategic moves to reset the trajectory of SAVO,” said Jason Liu, CEO, SAVO Group. “Two years ago we started redesigning our technology platform. Last year, we achieved profitability. And now we are seeing double-digit year over year growth with rapid product innovation and release. We’ve redesigned our business and it felt right to redesign our headquarters closer to our tech culture.”
SAVO secured the 27,000 square feet of space at the Mart working with Colliers. Box, noted for its designs of Chicagoclients Groupon, Sprout Social and Threadless, is leading the interior design. In addition to having Global headquarters at the Merchandise Mart, SAVO has offices in London and Raleigh.
Subscriber Experience Focused Service Provider Turns To Calix Marketing Cloud And Calix Support Cloud To Delight Its Subscribers And Streamline Internal Operations
Calix, Inc, the world leader in Subscriber Driven Intelligent Access, announced that Logic, one of the Caribbean’s premier service providers, has selected Calix Marketing Cloud (CMC) and Calix Support Cloud (CSC) to enhance existing GigaCenter deployments and deliver an unmatched subscriber experience in the Cayman Islands. Logic is using behavioral analytics and business intelligence insights provided by these two Calix Cloud services to optimize every subscriber interaction. CMC allows Logic to target the right subscribers with the right service to match their needs, while CSC enables a more effective customer support experience where automation and analytics greatly enhance the likelihood of rapidly identifying the customer issues for resolution. With Calix Cloud, Logic has access to the data, insights, and automation required to delight its subscribers while becoming dramatically more efficient – driving significant costs out of their daily operations.
Rob McNabb, CEO – Logic Communications Ltd
“What Calix Cloud services provide is exactly what we’ve been looking for to take our company to the next level,” said Rob McNabb, Logic CEO. “Insights drive action, and Calix Marketing Cloud and Calix Support Cloud will almost immediately reduce operation costs, drive increased revenue, and increase customer satisfaction. We are excited to partner with Calix on this initiative, and I’m personally very excited to see the impact of these cloud services on our business going forward.”
Built specifically for broadband marketers, CMC automates the gathering, analysis, and presentation of subscriber behaviors, giving Logic continuous access to data-driven subscriber insights. Logic’s marketing team will use CMC’s intuitive dashboards to gain a better understanding of their subscriber’s online usage patterns, such as their use of heavy concurrent media streaming and new IoT devices in the connected home, thereby laying a foundation for better marketing and service creation. These dashboards provide all the necessary information to allow Logic to develop specific service offerings optimized for subscriber retention and upsell. Also, CMC’s Social Channel Heatmap will allow Logic to stay plugged-in to the social platform preferences of their highly-connected subscribers, helping Logic to determine where and when to invest in marketing programs.
Already a long-time Calix Consumer Connect Plus customer, Logic is turning to CSC’s instrumentation-aware automation and analytics to drive greater efficiency and customer satisfaction. The ease-of-use of CSC empowers Logic’s Help Desk customer service representatives (CSRs) to quickly resolve complicated, connected home issues, including Wi-Fi connectivity, through a single, comprehensive dashboard providing a holistic view of the subscriber’s home network. Armed with this view, CSRs can quickly use CSC to identify the root cause of their subscriber’s problem. In many cases, the CSR will be immediately empowered to fix the problem remotely, and in other cases, they will be able to provide clear recommendations on how to remediate the issue for the customer. This will allow Logic to reduce the number of call escalations that burden their Tier 2 support and network engineering teams as well as minimize the number of costly truck rolls.
“Calix Cloud continues to gain momentum, and we are consistently seeing innovative service providers like Logic realize the value of these role-specific solutions,” said Stephen Eyre, area vice president of cloud and software solution sales at Calix. “Although each service can be purchased and deployed individually, the combination of Calix Marketing Cloud and Calix Support Cloud with our industry leading GigaCenters gives Logic access to a complete view of their subscriber experience – from turn-up to troubleshooting – at the click of a button. By taking advantage of our Cloud Customer Success Program, Logic will experience Calix Cloud benefits both more quickly and throughout their partnership with Calix. We look forward to seeing the positive impact on Logic’s business as data-driven insights and behavioral analytics are delivered from day one.”
Gong.Io Is A Pioneer In AI And Machine Learning Capabilities For Conversation Intelligence And Sales Performance
Gong.io, a leading Conversation Intelligence platform for sales teams, has announced a $ 20 Million Series A1 funding round, led by existing investors Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and CheckPoint Co-Founder Shlomo Kramer. They were joined by new investors Wing Venture Capital and NextWorld Capital. Peter Wagner, Founding Partner at Wing Venture Capital, and Ben Fu, General Partner at NextWorld Capital, will join Going.io as Board Observers.
Gong.io’s Patented AI Technology Transforms Sales Conversations with Actionable Analytics
Amit Bendov, CEO and Co-Founder at Gong.io
Serial entrepreneurs Amit Bendov and Eilon Reshef co-founded Gong.io in 2015. While managing some of the most successful start-ups, they realized that most companies don’t understand why their sales teams aren’t meeting their targets. Gong.io leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to dramatically change the way salespeople make calls.
Eilon Reshef, Co-Founder at Gong
CEO Amit Bendov said, “Hardly a year since our first sale and it clearly feels like we’re on a rocket ship. Conversation Intelligence is the biggest shift in sales since CRM was introduced. We are humbled by the overwhelmingly positive customer feedback we’re receiving and are already working on a very ambitious product road map to continue the innovation. We will use the latest round of funding to hire dozens of developers and researchers to expand our product and to step up our sales, marketing, and support activities.”
Gong.io’s patented technology automatically records sales calls and video conferences, transcribes them, and then uses AI and machine learning to analyze hundreds of data parameters within each call. By analyzing sales call patterns and matching them to business outcomes, Gong.io provides actionable insights to salespeople and sales leaders so that they can improve their performance and win many more deals.
Funding will help to extend growth
The new funding will further fuel Gong.io’s impressive growth with revenue more than doubling for four consecutive quarters. The company was recently recognized by Gartner as a 2017 Cool Vendor in CRM Sales. Some of their customers include –
Dror Nahumi, General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, said, “We have been very impressed with Gong.io’s rapid growth and stellar execution of their original vision and we are thrilled to increase our investment. Gong.io is taking a strong lead in a whitespace category that will grow.”
Peter Wagner, Founding Partner of Wing Venture Capital, said, “The conversations a company has with its customers are strategic data assets that have been untapped for far too long. For the first time, Gong.io turns these customer conversations into productive intelligence resources with profound implications across the enterprise.”
Ben Fu, General Partner at NextWorld Capital, said, “Gong.io is the perfect convergence of next generation SaaS, Big Data, AI and Machine Learning—applied to conversations that directly impact sales, the lifeblood of any company. We see Conversation Intelligence as the future of AI-powered sales and we’re excited to help Gong.io dominate this new enterprise category around the globe.”
AI-assisted Sales Technology enables Accurate Deal Closure
The AI-assisted conversation intelligence and account analytics platforms take guessing out of the equation, for the B2B sales and marketing teams. CEO Amit Bendov had mentioned that businesses lose 80% of their leads after the first few phone calls with sales people despite investing trillions of dollars into reaching, nurturing, and contacting leads. With the new funding coming in, Gong is focussed on improving conversation intelligence and solving sales conversion problems by “pioneering a new category of solutions.”
From presenting actionable insights on a single window to offering accurate reports and analytics, AI-assisted sales performance technologies enhance the ROI of CRM and automation capabilities.
Last month, the sales email automation and prospecting platform – Reply.io, introduced Live Tasks to convert prospects into customers by following task suggestions. Projected as a customizable task automation feature for marketing and sales, Live Tasks reduces the need to rely or revisit the database of contacts in order to see who to connect next.
Olivia Milton, CMO at Reply.io
In an exclusive interview at MarTech Series, Reply’s Chief Marketing Officer Olivia Milton explained the unique features of Live Tasks and how customers can benefit from it.
MTS: Hi, Olivia. Tell us about your role at Reply and the team that you lead.
Olivia Milton: Reply is a sales acceleration platform, which automates 1:1 communication at scale, while keeping it completely personal. It covers various use cases, like inbound and outbound sales, recruiting outreach, account management, business development, new user trials and onboarding existing customers.
I joined the Reply team of 12 professionals a year ago as CMO; today, we’re a team of 35 people working remotely from 10 time zones – 5 of them are in marketing. Working at a startup requires from you to a be a ‘one-man band’ – it’s equally important to choose the right strategy, setup and drive marketing processes, collaborate with the other teams, and implement various marketing tasks, while being flexible enough to switch between them.
The keywords that would explain working at a small SaaS startup are ‘uncertainty’ and ‘adaptivity’ – on the one hand, you can’t be 100% sure your vision for the product will stay the same since the market changes so fast. On the other, you need to be flexible and have the ability to quickly adapt the tool to a new, profitable niche or changing market conditions.
In marketing, we are also focused on business metrics which are far more actionable for company growth from an operational standpoint.
Ad impressions, link clicks, and page views aren’t indicative of company performance and the pace at which we grow. Instead, conversions from visitor to trial, and to customer tracked by channel and particular campaigns with the costs properly attributed, etc. – this is what really matters for business growth.
MTS: What is Live Tasks? At what stage of the sales cycle should marketers think of using this product?
Olivia: Live Tasks is Reply’s new smart automation feature, part of the Reply platform, which enables users to convert even more prospects to customers by following task suggestions. The system continuously monitors the performance of email campaigns and suggests the next action to take so your team never misses out on a winning opportunity.
From the perspective of a single marketing-sales pipeline, Reply covers the lead nurturing and prospecting stages. Live Tasks is the feature that we and our customers have been waiting for a while. Just imagine – you should never go through your database of contacts and think who you should contact next. Instead, you can have a live database that provides you with suggestions (Live Tasks) on who you should talk to, based on custom triggers.
For example, you sent a sequence of emails to list of prospects but some of them have never replied; or you haven’t been in touch with a group of contacts for a while and the system will suggest that you touch base. Or, you just forgot to get back to some prospects – the system will remind you to do so.
Use cases for Live Tasks:
– Prospects finished campaign but never replied to your emails – every two weeks, Reply analyzes campaigns and creates task suggestions for these contacts. For example, moving the prospects to another campaign.
– Prospects viewed your email several times – reach out to those prospects that are likely to be more interested than others. Reply monitors your initial outreach campaigns and creates task suggestions for these contacts every day.
– Contacts clicked on links in your email – allows you to follow-up with the hottest prospects from your campaigns. Once a prospect from a particular campaign clicks on the link in your email (this can be a link to your website or special offer), Reply creates a task suggestion on a daily basis so that you won’t miss out on the deal.*
– Contacts replied to your email, but you forgot the send a follow-up – Reply checks your campaigns to find those prospects who answered your email but didn’t receive a follow-up and creates tasks suggestions to contact them.*
*The two last use cases are coming soon.
MTS: Does Reply integrate with any of the top Marketing Automation platforms? What part of the stack will Reply integrate into?
Olivia: Reply has a wide range of integration options, including the ones that can be done via Zapier – you can connect any marketing automation solution listed on Zapier with Reply using available zaps or creating your own.
MTS: How many live tasks can be listed and executed by Live Tasks? What are the basic requirements to include Live Tasks into marketing and sales strategies?
Olivia: There are no limits to how many Live Tasks can be created – the system analyses all email campaigns in your Reply account and automatically creates batches of tasks suggestions according to a particular use case. The more email campaigns in Reply you have, the more Live Tasks you’ll get.
In order to integrate the Live Tasks feature into marketing and sales workflows, you should analyze your current lead nurturing and prospecting processes and decide what you’d like to do next with those contacts found by the system – should you move them to a subsequent email campaign (so, what is this campaign about, what is its goal?) or, (as in a case of hot leads) pass those prospects onto an SDR / sales department for a personal call? Once you decide and set up processes between departments, integrate Reply with your marketing and sales tools for a smooth and clear process.
MTS: Is Live Tasks using Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning in any form? If yes, how is AI being used for outbound and inbound sales strategies?
Olivia: Live Tasks is more about smart automation however, this will be a part of a complex feature stack we are working on to create the game-changing Customer Relationship Automation platform. The idea of the platform is simple and revolutionary at the same time – customer relationships shouldn’t be managed personally, but automated by AI.
Consider this – a ceaseless 24-hour assistant pouring over all of your emails and chats, offering suggestions or even taking the optimal action at the perfect moment to close a deal. This assistant will search day and night for leads that match your ideal customer profile and instantly reach out to them, will go through your current list of prospects and recommend whom you should reach out to, based on where they are in the sequence. It will automatically schedule a call to a prospect upon opening your email, connecting you with them at the most opportune time. It will then analyse the context of your conversation and automatically update tasks based on the call.
While it dramatically changes the approach to the everyday work of sales reps, this is the future of sales and we’re evolving Reply towards it.
MTS: Reply’s website states that “Reply monitors your initial outreach campaigns and creates task suggestions for these contacts every day. This task expires every three days.” How does this dateline work?
Olivia: Correct – in order to keep you up-to-date with current results of your email campaigns and guarantee the best outcome from using the functionality, Live Tasks has expiry dates.
For instance, Live Tasks generated a ‘Prospects viewed your email several times’ use case for all of your email campaigns in Reply and those will expire in three days. However the system will generate a new portion of ‘fresh’ tasks with contacts you need to reach out to.
MTS: Thank you, Olivia, for answering all our questions. We look forward to having you back at MarTech Series soon for more insights.
Twenty-Year Engineering Veteran Brings Proven Processes, Team Development, and Product Strategy Acumen to Aviso’s Global Engineering Organization
Aviso, the leader in AI-powered sales forecasting and visibility, today announced that technology veteran Manas Chaliha has joined the company as Vice President of Engineering. Chaliha is chartered with the technical product strategy and development of Aviso Sales Vision™, the company’s flagship sales forecasting and visibility platform. In this role, Chaliha will apply his proven skills in artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, and the Agile/Scrum software development process to leadership of the company’s engineering effort in the US and India.
“Manas brings over two decades of innovation and engineering leadership to Aviso,” said Michael Lock, Aviso CEO. “His proven track record of building and scaling highly effective, global engineering and product organizations will ensure that Aviso Sales Vision continues to lead the industry in advanced, AI-based solutions for sales forecasting and management. We are fortunate to add him to our team and welcome his leadership and vision for the Aviso platform.”
Manas Chaliha
Prior to joining Aviso, Chaliha was a founding technical leader at Snapfish where he provided financial, technical, and operating responsibility for all its products. Under his leadership, the Snapfish photo platform grew to be a leader in the competitive photo storage and sharing market with over 30 million daily photo uploads and 50 million orders annually.
Chaliha brings expertise in technology planning and development for complex corporate business systems, processes, and rapid technology innovation. He is particularly skilled at aligning product engineering priorities with targeted business and customer objectives. Chaliha will manage Aviso’s global release process and be responsible for recruiting, developing, and retaining top talent across the company’s global engineering and product organizations.
“I am looking forward to extending Aviso’s technical leadership and feature set to meet the needs of today’s fast-moving sales organizations,” added Chaliha. “Aviso brings a unique, intelligent approach to managing sales, which is the revenue engine of enterprise companies. It’s an exciting time of innovation and growth for Aviso, and I’m very proud to be part of it.”
Onlinesales.Ai Is The First Of Its Kind Marketing Platform For Ecommerce Businesses, Backed Entirely By Artificial Intelligence-Driven Advanced Automation Technology.
Sokrati launched a new business unit – OnlineSales.ai – an E-Commerce marketing and analytics platform. It’s an AI-led platform for Retailers and E-Commerce Marketplaces globally that converges acquisition and retention marketing along with data-led applications on a single platform.
Sokrati, formed by ex-Amazonians from Seattle in 2009, has grown to become one of the most reliable and trusted partners of Digital Transformation for 150+ enterprise brands across verticals like Banking Fin-Tech, Auto, Telecom, and CPG. With its new business unit – OnlineSales.ai, the founders are eyeing global expansion within the commerce vertical with its Enterprise SaaS offering.
OnlineSales.ai aims at becoming retailer’s operating system for user acquisition, retention and monetization. At its core, the platform gathers and mines billions of data points to build product catalog intelligence, user personas and dynamics of retail economics. This system intelligence is combined with technology automation on an OnlineSales platform that now hosts connected apps across marketing, user experience and data technologies – all on a single platform.
“OnlineSales.ai aims to provide 10x better experience to retailers in their pursuit towards acquisition & retention marketing while improving its business margins overall. We aim to democratize data technology & business analytics for the retailers globally,” said Ashish Mehta, CEO & Co-Founder. Launched as an experimental pilot in 2016 with 4 team members, the platform currently serves 250+ retailers on its platform and has a 70-person team focusing on bringing this product vision to reality.
“Data and Tech convergence is the future. And when this the convergence is further specialized by a vertical; it is not only relevant but also extremely powerful. OnlineSales.ai plays at the convergence point of marketing technology, retail experience technology & data science – enabling retailers to monetize their business – smartly & scalably,” said Kaushik Paranjape, CTO and Co-Founder.
ON24 Prospect Engagement Profile transforms customer engagement into data-driven insights, empowering marketing and sales with the actionable intelligence they need to achieve organizational alignment and meet pipeline goals
According to the Forrester blog, 74% of business buyers conduct research online before talking to sales, and hence, it’s critical for B2B marketers to engage their prospects with compelling digital experiences and turn those interactions into insights that accelerate the customer’s buying journey. The ON24 webinar marketing platform offers businesses an innovative solution to this challenge, enabling marketers to form a human connection with thousands of their prospects for almost an hour and translate that engagement into data.
ON24 has advanced its capabilities by launching the enhanced ON24 Prospect Engagement Profile. This unique set of data analytics translates webinar engagement into valuable intelligence for marketers to better understand a customer’s buying intent and automatically deliver that knowledge to their sales counterparts. Not only do these insights enable more successful sales conversations, they advance marketing and sales alignment, a mandate for engaging today’s B2B buyer.
The ON24 Prospect Engagement Profile transforms webinar engagement into data-driven insights, empowering marketing and sales with the actionable intelligence they need to achieve organizational alignment and meet pipeline goals.
Joe Hyland, CMO at ON24, said, “As CMOs, it’s our responsibility to partner with sales leadership and make sure we’re all working from the same view of the customer. Sharing all the customer insights that qualify a lead and putting them at the fingertips of our salespeople is an important first step toward reaching that goal. Only then will we align our organizations to meaningfully engage our customers and win their business.”
Jeremy Collins, Director of Digital Marketing, BrightEdge, said, “At BrightEdge, our top priority is to help marketers create SEO and content marketing strategies that deliver real, measurable results. We leverage ON24’s webinar marketing platform to deliver product innovations and industry thought leadership to our SEO and Content Marketing community.
Additionally, ON24 allows us to interact with each attendee that evolves normal one-way webinars into two-way conversations that help drive adoption, loyalty and, most importantly, ROI for our community.”
The ON24 Prospect Engagement Profile analyzes an individual’s webinar engagement to convey their level of interactivity and interests, including the questions they asked, resources downloaded and responses to any given polls and surveys. These insights are available in ON24’s webinar marketing platform and can be integrated directly with Salesforce and other CRM systems.
As the first and only webinar marketing platform to deliver this level of insight, ON24 builds on its mission to help marketers drive revenue through engagement-driven webinars that deliver high-quality data, leads and results.
Everstring’s Audience Platform And Bombora’s Powerful Aggregator Would Enable B2b Marketers To Leverage Intent Data For Account Targeting, Giving Them A Complete View Of Their Ideal Customer
Predictive sales and marketing platforms rely heavily on audience and intent data. Conforming to the MarTech trends, EverString, a leading provider of AI-based SaaS for B2B, has joined forces with Bombora, the largest aggregator of B2B intent data. A powerful partnership for B2B sales and marketing, EverString and Bombora intend to deliver accurate information to B2B marketers based on the level of interest in the topics that were selected based on target list of companies and their location.
“Over the past few months, in some ways due to the partnership, it’s becoming clearer how predictive SaaS solutions and intent data are like pieces that fit together.” — Marc Johnson, CMO and General Manager at Bombora
EverString Audience Platform and Bombora’s powerful would enable B2B marketers to leverage intent data for account targeting, giving them a complete view of their ideal customer, and what they are interested in real-time. For Bombora, joining hands with EverString ensures that B2B marketers can connect companies with potential buyers and flow that knowledge across multiple sales and marketing activities, including account targeting, outbound sales, event planning and lead generation.
According to a blog, the EverString-Bombora partnership is designed to deliver put customer profiles and tracking surge within a single-view window. Bringing these two technologies together not only served a market-driven purpose for the two companies, but it also gives a much more holistic experience to customers.
Marc Johnson, CMO and General Manager at Bombora, said, “Having seen how our customers – and then ourselves as marketers – use Everstring and Bombora to understand potential customers in complementary ways, we realized that a partnership was ultimately the best way to ensure customer success.”
With the combination of Bombora and EverString, B2B marketers would be able to perform—
Account-based targeting
Customers are able to translate the intent data into identification, letting salespeople call into accounts that are surging.
Field marketing
Teams no longer have to fly blind in regions they are unfamiliar with. Intent data gives signals so that teams can target accounts based on location analytics.
Pipeline Prioritization
By looking at intent signals, teams can see whether or not a potential prospect is interested in their product or service, and at the right time. This allows salespeople and marketers keep their funnel as organized as possible.
Account Management
If a manager is looking to upsell or cross-sell, they can monitor surge data to see if customers are researching their competitors.
Content Creation
Whether it is the content on your site, social posts or email campaigns, intent signals found in EverString’s platform can let you hone in on messaging and filter to high-fit customers.
However, the most impressive aspect of this partnership is undoubtedly the value for Bombora and EverString’s common customers, and the increasing clarity of signals from the marketplace.
With the advancement in predictive analytics and growing impetus on intent data, B2B companies are increasingly seeking inputs on intent from AI sales and marketing platforms. AI and intent simplify sales and marketing by refining the business relationship, allowing marketers to work flexibly, whether they are using intent inside the platform or exporting it into existing marketing automation platforms. A clear vision across campaigns enables sales teams can close deals faster while marketers can seek new opportunities through every stage of the funnel.
The new integration enables joint Oracle Responsys and Pixlee customers to easily display user-generated content tagged with specific product SKUs in email marketing campaigns. Marketers can enrich their campaigns with shoppable product photos and videos from real customers with Pixlee app on Oracle Marketing Cloud.
Awad Sayeed, co-founder and CTO, Pixlee
“Pixlee has proven that displaying user-generated content on marketing channels increases conversions by 2x. With the Oracle Marketing Cloud integration, Pixlee brings the power of user-generated content and the ease-of-use of our platform to yet another e-commerce channel—offering a more personalized and relevant shopping experience for email subscribers,” says Awad Sayeed, co-founder and CTO, Pixlee.
Marketers can publish relevant, real-time content that contextualizes products and optimizes the impact of triggered emails. This results in higher click-through rates and increased top line revenue.
Pixlee’s new integration is available for the following email campaigns:
Cart Abandonment Emails: Feature product-specific customer photos in abandoned cart emails to boost conversion rates and recover revenue.
Post-Purchase Emails: Request product reviews post-purchase to enhance customer engagement and loyalty.
Newsletters and Promotional Emails: Display real customer photos in automated marketing campaigns to add context and relevance. Promote social contests and campaigns in email marketing to encourage sharing, engagement, and community.
Product Promotion Emails: Feature product-specific customer photos to promote product announcements and promotions.
Charlotte Russe displays Pixlee-managed user-generated content in a promotional email.
The Oracle Marketing AppCloud offers Oracle customers a broad set of marketing apps and data services to extend and optimize their technology investments.
To install and implement the Pixlee application, Oracle Marketing Cloud customers can visit the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.
Salesforce announced new Einstein Platform Services and Trailhead learning paths to empower the developer community of more than 4 million Trailblazers. The new Einstein Platform Services will enable users to build intelligent apps that customers love. By bringing together the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and interactive online learning, Salesforce further enables companies to deliver the next generation of sales, service, marketing, and commerce experiences to drive customer success. Salesforce will showcase these innovations at TrailheaDX, its second annual developer conference, designed for everyone to learn new skills and unlock their potential.
“The New Einstein Platform Services will enable developers to bring natural language processing and image recognition to any app–creating AI-powered customer experiences for sales, service, marketing and commerce.”
For enterprise app developers, user adoption, and loyalty are key measures of success. Today’s business users demand the same intelligent and personalized app experiences they are accustomed to in their personal lives. To keep pace with these expectations, developers need an innovative platform that makes it easy to incorporate the latest AI technologies into their apps. According to IDC, 80 percent of all apps will have an AI component by 20201.
Introducing New Einstein Platform Services for Building AI-Powered Customer Experiences
Salesforce Einstein, the first comprehensive AI for CRM, is an integrated set of AI technologies that make every Salesforce app smarter so business users can be more productive and deliver personalized, predictive customer experiences. Since Einstein is a core part of the Salesforce Platform, developers can utilize Einstein Platform Services to quickly build custom AI-powered CRM apps. Salesforce is currently extending its portfolio of Einstein Platform Services that will allow developers to create custom deep learning models to fit their specific business needs. Some of these Models are —
Einstein Sentiment
Einstein Sentiment will allow developers to classify the tone of any text, from prospect emails and social media posts to customer reviews and message boards, as positive, negative or neutral so that companies can quickly gain insight into customer attitudes and then take the appropriate action. For example, an airline could create a custom app that uses Einstein Sentiment to analyze tweets and other social media to understand overall impressions and prioritize negative posts that require service responses.
Einstein Intent
Einstein Intent will allow developers to train a model to classify the underlying intent of customer inquiries to automatically route leads, escalate service cases and personalize marketing campaigns. For example, a retail company could use Einstein Intent to build a custom app that automatically classifies inbound customer support queries to identify which customers are experiencing shipping problems and then proactively provide support messaging and tracking details.
Einstein Object Detection
Einstein Object Detection enables developers to train models to recognize multiple unique objects within a single image, as well as the location, size, and quantities of those objects. Einstein Object Detection can be applied to improve service, inventory management, and retail share-of-shelf apps. For example, a beverage company could streamline inventory management and service by automatically analyzing photos of retail shelves to count the product, and then calculate and process a new order.
Salesforce Trailhead Fuels The Developer Ecosystem—Introducing New Trails from Atlassian, GitHub, and Salesforce
Salesforce also opened the Trailhead Platform to the most in-demand skills in today’s developer ecosystem with new guided learning paths from Atlassian and GitHub.
Currently, Trailblazers at Salesforce is the fastest-growing enterprise developer community–transforming the way companies like Black Diamond, Shazam, Sierra Club, and Vlocity, build engaging customer experiences.
Sarah Franklin, SVP Developer Relations and GM, Trailhead, said, “There has never been a better time to be a Salesforce developer. Developer success leads to customer success, and we are on a mission to enable everyone to skill up for the AI revolution with the smartest tools and training.”
Trailhead is Salesforce’s online, interactive, gamified learning platform. Trailhead takes users on free, guided learning paths to gain developer skills. At the end of every trail, Trailblazers receive a badge showcasing their competency. Since launching in 2014, Trailblazers have earned more than 2.5 million badges, which directly relate to in-demand job skills.
“Salesforce is democratizing AI with Einstein, as well as democratizing learning with Trailhead, empowering everyone to build apps faster and advance their careers.”
“Salesforce has not only given me technical skills, but it has changed my life,” said Damian O’Farrill, Global Sales Operations & Marketing Automation Lead, Autodesk. Damien added, “I was a salsa dance instructor before I became a Salesforce developer. No matter who you are or what your educational background is, you can transform your career with Salesforce and Trailhead.”
Benefits of Atlassian + Salesforce integration
Agile software development is the standard today for building and shipping high-quality software, allowing teams to move faster, adjust to changing market trends and continuously improve. As a leading provider of agile software, Atlassian is invested in educating developer teams on the history, culture, and basics of agile development.
Seamless collaboration and source code management are vital to the success of every developer team. GitHub is a community of more than 22 million people working together to build software. Using Git, the foundational code GitHub is built on, and GitHub, developers can take advantage of version control while collaborating on code, allowing them to take their software development practices to the next level. Now with GitHub’s new Git and GitHub Basics badge on Trailhead, anyone can learn how to leverage the GitHub ecosystem, use best practices for collaborating on code or gain an in-depth understanding of Git.
Additionally, Dreampitch, the first-ever TrailheaDX startup pitch event, will give three startups the opportunity to compete for a $50,000 investment from Salesforce Ventures.
Unified Platform Services Empowers Developers
As the demand for intelligent apps increase, the speed that developers need to build at skyrockets. The new Unified Platform Services, enable better collaboration among developers, across the business, enabling them to build smart apps faster for sales, service, marketing, and commerce.
New Platform Events empower developers to increase business productivity and efficiency by building automated workflows and custom triggers based on changes to Salesforce data—including geolocation, billing, and customer data. With more integrations available between Salesforce and customer systems, developers can expand the existing capabilities of other integration options including Outbound Messaging and Apex Callouts. For example, developers can create triggers notifying external shipping apps to send out shipments as customers place orders—all in near real-time.
In the new Salesforce DX Open Beta, any developer, individually or as part of a team, can collaborate, manage and develop Salesforce apps across the entire lifecycle. Combining the power of Force.com with the Heroku experience developers love, Salesforce DX fully reimagines building, deploying and maintaining custom software on the Salesforce Platform.
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Sarah Franklin
Agile software development is the standard today for building and shipping high-quality software, allowing teams to move faster, adjust to changing market trends and continuously improve. As a leading provider of agile software, Atlassian is invested in educating developer teams on the history, culture, and basics of agile development.
Seamless collaboration and source code management are vital to the success of every developer team. GitHub is a community of more than 22 million people working together to build software. Using Git, the foundational code GitHub is built on, and GitHub, developers can take advantage of version control while collaborating on code, allowing them to take their software development practices to the next level. Now with GitHub’s new 
