Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, confirmed that Salesforce will unveil a blockchain product later this year at their Dreamforce conference in late September.
[Update 30 May 2019: Salesforce Blockchain unveiled]Benioff had a fireside chat at the TrailheaDX conference with his co-founder Parker Harris talking to Business Insider’s Julie Bort. He gave blockchain as an example of the importance of being open to new opportunities.
He’d been thinking about blockchain for a little while. At this year’s World Economic Forum, there was a crypto conference in Davos at the same time. Someone from the crypto conference struck up a conversation with Benioff.
The spark
The CEO said:”This person comes up to me and starts talking to me about cryptography and also cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and all of these various things. And I’m just thinking to myself ‘What is going on?’. I’m like ‘there must be a reason this is happening’. Now I’d been thinking a lot about what is Salesforce’s strategy in blockchain, what is Salesforce’s strategy around cryptocurrencies? And how will we relate to all of these things and how will these things move forward.”
“And just by having that conversation and just talking to him and just letting it happen, when it happens I get a feeling there’s a reason I’m talking to this person, and I’m just going to talk to this person.”
Benioff continued “I’ve never met this person before, I don’t know a ton about this area. And going deeper and deeper and deeper, and then in my mind all of a sudden I just hear this click. And it’s like you know if you did this, this and this you could add blockchain and cryptocurrencies into Salesforce. And this is how you would do it, and this is what it would mean to your customers and how it would impact them. And I’m like ‘wow’ and that’s kind of how it works.”
“I hope that by Dreamforce we will have a blockchain and a cryptocurrency solution for Salesforce and for all of our customers because I think it’s a really exciting area.”
One of the takeaways is Benioff’s reference is not just to blockchain but to cryptocurrency us well.
Partner Solution
In fact, Salesforce already has a blockchain solution. In May 2017, a Salesforce partner, Dapps.ai, introduced ‘Blockchain Application Manager’ (BAM) suite which was built natively on Salesforce. This enables Salesforce users to integrate between Salesforce and one of three blockchains: Hyperledger Fabric (permissioned), Ethereum or Bitcoin.
Probably a slip of the tongue, but when introducing Dapps at a Salesforce event, a member of Salesforce referred to Dapps as the blockchain team.
More will be revealed in September at the Dreamforce conference.
