Salesforce has always been a company that is looking ahead to
the next big technology, whether that was mobile, social, internet of things or
artificial intelligence. In an interview with Business Insider’s Julie Bort at
the end of March, Salesforce co-founders Marc Benioff and Parker Harris talked
about a range of subjects including how the company came to be working on one
of the next hot technologies, a blockchain product.
Benioff told a story of being at the World Economic Forum
in Switzerland
where a bit of serendipity led him to start thinking about blockchain and how
it could be used as part of the Salesforce family of products.
As it turned out, there was a crypto conference going on at the
same time as the WEF and the two worlds collided at a Salesforce event at the
Intercontinental Hotel. While there, one of the crypto conference attendees
engaged Benioff in a conversation and it was the start of something.
“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,” Benioff said. He is actually a
big believer in the power of serendipity, and he said just by having that
conversation, it started him down the road to thinking more seriously about
Salesforce’s role in this developing technology.
He said the more he thought about it, the more he believed that
Salesforce could make use of Blockchain. Then suddenly something clicked for
him and he 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 clearly a visionary and says a lot of that comes from
simply paying attention as he did when he talked to this person in Davos, and
recognizing an opportunity to expand Salesforce in a meaningful way. “A lot
[these ideas] comes from paying attention, listening. There’s new ideas coming
all the time,” he said. He recognizes that there are more ideas out there than
they can possibly execute, but part of his job is understanding which ones are
the most important for Salesforce customers.
Blockchain is the electronic ledger used to track Bitcoin or
other digital currencies, but it also has a more general business role. As an
irrefutable and immutable record, it can track just about anything of value.
Dreamforce is Salesforce’s enormous annual customer conference.
It will be held this year from September 25-28 in San Francisco , and if it all works as
planned, they could be announcing a blockchain product this year.
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