The Internet of Things is simply the biggest thing happening in technology — that’s all there is to it.
By 2020, there will be more than 41 billion new machines connected to the Internet.
If that doesn’t blow your mind, think about this: The number of machines connected to the Internet across the globe is currently about 4.9 billion. Analysts originally predicted it would be 25 billion by 2020 but quickly realized it was going to be a hell of a lot more.
This is because it’s not going to all be primary computing devices. The Internet’s first big boom was when consumers started connecting their computers via dialup and then by other fixed means of communication.
It’s currently in its second big boom, when the world is connecting via portable devices, specifically smartphones. The Internet of Things era is going to be a different kind of boom because the vast majority of the new connections are going to be sensors and accessories, not controlled by a user.
Sure, smart cars and wearables and drones will make up some of the new connections, but the major influx of data is going to be passively added to the Internet.
Someone is going to have to handle all that data before it becomes useful to anyone.
This week, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) debuted a new branch of its business that promises to do just that.
This new arm is tasked with Internet of Things data, and it’s logically named the Salesforce Internet of Things Cloud.
Salesforce is the biggest name in customer relationship management (CRM) software for businesses, and it is one of the biggest success stories in software-as-a-service (SaaS).
Its Internet of Things offering includes customer and partner data but expands outward to also include data pulled from apps, devices, and sensors. All this disparate data, from weather to social to nearly anything else, is going to be included all in the name of helping a company improve its customer relationships.
In short, it’s the Internet of Things, but put toward helping CRM, Salesforce’s wheelhouse.
The new service is built on one of Salesforce’s platforms known as Thunder, which is an event-processing engine. It took approximately a year for Salesforce to build it, and it processes data from multiple simultaneous sources and blends it into the existent CRM framework.
The idea is that this platform will be able to move beyond simple business intelligence and into real-time data and predictive analytics for business.
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While the end result is very much in line with the current Salesforce catalog of services, the route the data takes is somewhat outside the company’s expertise.
For these different types of data to be useful to a CRM system, they have to not only be sorted and managed but also translated and analyzed. It’s more big data than SaaS, but the new platform has been built out of open-source Apache components to handle it, including a large-scale data processing engine called Spark, a distributed real-time computation system called Storm, a messaging broker called Kafka, and a scalable database system called Cassandra.
The viability of this product remains to be seen, but it is timed well. The Internet of Things is still in its early stages, and Salesforce has time to grow with it.
It’s a strong brand to add to an IoT portfolio.
Good Investing,
Tim Conneally
For the last seven years, Tim Conneally has covered the world of mobile and wireless technology, enterprise software, network hardware, and next generation consumer technology. Tim has previously written for long-running software news outlet Betanews and for financial media powerhouse Forbes.
