After a spate of Salesforce acquisitions over the past year, the company has extended well beyond CRM into e-commerce and customer experience, artificial intelligence and new collaboration tools. The question going forward is how effectively the company will integrate its billion-dollar acquisitions into the Customer Success Platform and whether its efforts will make Salesforce wide-ranging enough to truly extend beyond sales and marketing into the more wide-ranging domain of customer experience.
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The key to the successful integration of these various acquisitions is the company`s unique collaborative corporate culture, said company executives at this month`s Salesforce Analyst Summit. They believe that this culture enables Salesforce to address the age-old integration challenges that have plagued the software industry for decades.
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At the Summit, Salesforce executives acknowledged that the company`s rapid growth has created new challenges in achieving the mission of delivering user-friendly technologies that boost revenue, improve efficiency and solidify customer relationships.
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As a result of its acquisitions and internal initiatives, Salesforce has taken aim at some of the biggest market opportunities and associated challenges, including artificial intelligence (AI) with Salesforce Einstein, analytics with Wave Analytics Cloud, digital marketing with the acquisition of ExactTarget, e-commerce via the Demandware acquisition and the internet of things.
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Tackling Acquisition Integration
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As a consequence of all these moves, Salesforce is facing three key integration challenges — application integration, data integration and organizational integration.
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At the application level, the company started with a single software-as-a-service architecture that underlies its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and industry cloud offerings. However, the Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud services have been built by ExactTarget and Demandware, respectively, and Salesforce execs aren`t planning to rearchitect them anytime soon.
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Instead, the company is encouraging the various software development teams to adopt a common DevOps methodology, build a common set of APIs and create a common application framework that will permit…