Dreamforce 2024 | AnalystANGLE | theCUBE Research

Clips
News
More from Dreamforce 2024

Christophe Bertrand

Principal Analyst

SiliconANGLE & theCUBE

Salesforce’s data integration and gen AI unite its ecosystem: theCUBE insights from Dreamforce

The rise of generative artificial intelligence is forcing solutions companies to refine operations. One of those is Salesforce Inc., whose considerable yet disparate platforms across sales, customer services, analytics, and e-commerce have been integrated through enhanced data integration as it eyes a more cohesive positioning in the enterprise software space.Christophe Bertrand and John Furrier dissect the route for Salesforce to continue its upward momentum.“Salesforce has always been hampered by the reputation of having multiple disparate systems through acquisitions and multiple platforms not working well together,” said John Furrier (pictured, right), chief analyst at theCUBE Research

play_circle_outline Focus on operational efficiency, ecosystem innovation, and leveraging existing platforms

play_circle_outline Overview of Salesforce's application portfolio, customization, and data integration

play_circle_outline Potential for Salesforce to become a major system of record in a distributed system

Info

AnalystANGLE | theCUBE Research

Christophe Bertrand

Principal Analyst SiliconANGLE & theCUBE

search

>> Hello, welcome to theCUBE coverage here in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with theCUBE Research Analyst, Christophe Bertrand, who's with me here in San Francisco. Dreamforce is happening, it's getting going. We are getting it off the ground here in theCUBE. Got great wall-to-wall coverage. Again, this event is turning into quite the ecosystem event gen AI event. Salesforce has always been hampered by the reputation of having multiple disparate systems through acquisitions, multiple platforms not working well together. So this Dreamforce could be Salesforce living the dream, bringing it all together and building those abstraction layers and making gen AI be the glue layer, so to speak, to bring it all together to abstract away all the complexity, reduce the steps it takes to get things done. We're going to wait to see all the announcements in the keynote. Christophe, great to see you and thanks for coming in with team today. Full team coverage here in San Francisco.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah, nice to be here. Absolutely.

>> The big genesis, you heard my little monologue intros is that Salesforce has been hampered with the reputation and they got such a great business and obviously continues to thunder along in performance, but now, this is a dream scenario for them, pun intended, at Dreamforce with Agentic systems hitting the scene and pulling all that data together because Salesforce, although has disparate systems, has tons of data. They got to use the data, they got to get agents out there, they got to protect the data. So it is a perfect scenario for them to be the poster child of how gen AI could transform an existing giant into a mega giant.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. And you'll see this in our coverage. We had a great conversation with a customer this morning, a smaller sized company, but they were able, in a matter of weeks or months, to actually leverage the capabilities of AI and Gen AI in Salesforce on their own without having to go to a complex type of process with an external integrator. So I think there is definitely a lot going on. There are lots of obviously announcements around Agentforce and that's going to be absolutely key. The ability to also talk to one of their partners in the ecosystem. It is going to be about AI for sure.

>> We know that. Marc Benioff has always has his finger on the pulse and he's literally on... I've been watching his career for over a decade and a half now, close. He is on every wave and he implements it. Sometimes, they become a little bit hype, but okay, either way, he's got a good nose for the waves. Agentic, I think he's got a good call here, thinking Agentic force and bringing agents because I think that will help them. Your research has been over the years, deep in data, protecting data. Ransomware has been a big attack. As Salesforce puts this system together, one of the things they have to be careful of, as all their customers is, you now have systems connecting through APIs, ecosystem partners, all these alliances. There's a lot of connective tissue that's underway of being reset or repurposed or refactored. How do you see that? Because the game is still the same. You've got data protection, cyber resilience, securing that data is huge and also using that data and replicating it, these are storage paradigms moving to Gen AI.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. And one of the things that's key here is to remember that there is a bulk API and that bulk API actually has been an interesting way of protecting data within Salesforce. Now, not everybody is necessarily doing it the same way, and I would say, this is a perfect question because of the recent announcement of the acquisition of OwnBackup or OWN, how they used to be called OwnBackup, now OWN by Salesforce, which actually begs a few questions. Number one is they have tried a couple of times to actually get into that data protection space, backup and recovery space, yet that didn't quite work. They have, of course, in a sense, pushed the problem back to customers by having an ecosystem of players like ODA, Seva, Veeam, others, Haiku, et cetera, play as the solution. Yet, now, what is the message? So I think I'm going to be looking for indications in terms of what's next for this acquisition. Obviously, it's a bit early to say, it has to close, but what it says is this, to your point, data is very critical and when you spend a couple of billion on protecting data, it's because you really care about it. Now, Gen.ai is only going to accelerate that requirement. Why? Because you mentioned it. It's about the essence of the business. It's about automating workflows. It's about leveraging all of that data that maybe you're actually not using today. So guess what? A lot of people are probably underplaying their hands with their data right now. I think the promise here of Gen.ai is, and AI in general within Salesforce, protected correctly, is that it will bring a lot of automations and a lot of great things to the table.

>> I had interviewed last year, Alice Steinglass, she's the EVP. She talked about responsible use of Gen.ai over a year ago, and that's a big focus here at Salesforce's is Dreamforce this year. Guardrails and data governance is a huge discussion because it's one of those things where it's not a sexy mainstream conversation, but when you think about Agentic systems and agents and sub-agents, I could see George and MK who runs NextGen platform for Salesforce, about to come on theCUBE next. His whole job is to make this platform horizontally scalable, yet domain specific with the data. So to let that data fly, you need to have really new kinds of governance, new cataloging and those guardrails because you have now multiple dimensions. You got sovereign cloud, you got geography, you got regions. So this is a complicated thing, and what Alice at Salesforce talked about is you have to have trust in the AI. How do you see that evolving? Because as you look at the data from the bottoms up, application developers just want to be abstracted away from the complexity. So all that data has to move on its own and be intelligent. Remember, drift and hallucinations is the big problem. They got to be smarter. What's your take on that?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let me go back to the basics here. First of all, there's no AI or leveraging of data that there itself is not compliant and you have to know... And in order to do that, you have to know what data you have and where it is across the board because there are a number of integrations, APIs from other sources into Salesforce and out of Salesforce. So let's start with that. And I would say, once we get that done, which is a big, big ask, really, to start, then I think you can get into the next step, which is, okay, now how do I really use this to augment what I know about my environment? I think there's a lot to do around augmentation, for sure. And you're right. I think the other question is how do you then not trust so much the AI but trust the data? Let's start with that. For me, it's about data trust, starting with very proper data management, responsible data management, compliant data management. That's going to be the price to pay before you can get into any fancy AI, in my opinion.

>> Yeah, Christophe, this highlights, to your point you just brought up, I want to bring this to the table, is with this new Gen.ai wave, it's a new category we're seeing that obviously, you've seen Nvidia and the hardware's hot, I've see category changeover. When you think about things that are important, operational efficiency becomes huge. So when you look at Salesforce and as they're evolving, one of the things that's really accelerating for this company is the fact that they're now having a lot more innovation in the ecosystem. You're starting to see them partner with AWS, the cloud providers, and again, you mentioned data's coming in and out of Salesforce, so we're talking about third party probably through APIs and other connectors, but this creates this idea that I got to create operational efficiency. So one, I want to get your thoughts on that. And then two, there's two schools of thought right now around this, you're seeing a trend where, oh, we're going to get rid of Salesforce and CRM systems and build our own. So you got this build your own mentality from a cost structure standpoint, but yet, you have this incumbent data position with Salesforce where if you get that operational platform right, the benefits are huge. So this is causing a huge surge of innovation inside the ecosystem. Not only ecosystem, ISVs, they build on top of platforms, but when you bring the notion up of talking to each other in real time at application speed for Gen.ai, that's a game changer in the sense of architecture. What's your thoughts on one, the ecosystem innovation equation with Salesforce in the marketplace and two, operational efficiency versus this build my own versus leverage existing?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, I think to build my own versus leveraging what's already there is pretty easy question to answer. So I'm not-

>> Okay answer then.

Christophe Bertrand

>> I'm not even going to go there. It's super simple. I think the question is first of all, what is your experience on Salesforce? What are you doing? I had a great example earlier today when we spoke with a client of Salesforce that really started by just dealing with leads and then got into the whole ERP platform and operating the business on Salesforce. And of course, now getting into Gen.ai and augmented type of use cases. And what I took away from it was the efficiency that was built in was tremendous. They were able to change their ability to manage their inventory. Go straight to the bottom line and customer experience. So the customers are happier because of their ability to inform them with emails of their status of their order and more. There's a lot more we discussed. Definitely a segment you should take a look at. I will say that's the first point of operational efficiency, as long as, of course, you know what you're doing and you work within the parameters of your business, understanding your workflows and translating them into the existing tools, you don't necessarily need a lot of customization within Salesforce to get a great job done. Now, it's not always the case. Larger the organization, the more complex it can get. Number two, I think go back to the point we made earlier around data. It's really about data. You have to have the goods in order to really reap the benefits of the platform. Another great example we heard was what can be done with Agentic AI and some announcements around agent force, especially around the professional services world, and definitely had a great conversation on this topic as well. I think it's going to get better, but for some, it may get a little worse before it gets better.

>> So folks watching, check out Christophe's research, he's doing some great work in this area. Again, super important. It's in the key areas that are where the innovation is. Okay, on the question of the innovation ecosystem, what's your thoughts? You've seen ecosystems over decades, multiple ways of innovation. What's your take on this one? Is it maybe being over optimistic or over excited by this change? What's your take on this ecosystem? It's a completely different power dynamic than we've seen before.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, is it an ecosystem or ecosystems? Because-

>> I would say both. Yeah.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah, it's both. And really, it depends on the topic. You have such a wide variety of players and partners, not just in what they do as a business, but also, in terms of themes around data, around Salesforce. I mentioned earlier, data protection, that's one ecosystem and it goes on and on. So I think it's a very, very healthy, very wide ecosystem. The promise of AI is to simplify, I think, the integration or the functioning of the various moving parts, and I think that's really what it comes down to. Automation, simplification, giving, at the end of the day, a customer more independence and autonomy. This being said, I think the architectural question that comes into play is how much you want to rely on APIs versus running native to an extent, which is a conversation we also had earlier. So I think this is one of the topics that will probably in time, become more critical because the more APIs, the more complexity, potentially. Although AI could help abstract that complexity.

>> I think the ecosystem's plural is the right answer and I think that you're right on the money. I think this is a great time. theCUBE will be covering this innovation in the ecosystem. So you'll see a lot more content come from us around partners, alliances, how they all work together from a deep tech perspective. Christophe, I wrote a post this morning around this event and setting the table with some content that we had before. Also, a teaser of what to expect. The title was Salesforce Living the Dreamforce Revolutionizing Business Workflows and Data Governance. By the way, if you like theCUBE and you like the free research at thecubereach.com, go check us out and engage with the content. It's free. We do this service to provide benefit to the community. If you're interested in being a creator and collaborating with us, join theCUBE Collective, go to that site, check it out. We do this for you, the audience, and we love doing it. So thanks for engaging with us. Appreciate you. Christophe, so my notes here were basically like, the landscape is changing, they're adding to their portfolio, customization, personalization, big paragraph on that with some great videos from Alice Steinglass and others, enhancing the sales cloud. Remember the data cloud is a huge part of it. Amber Armstrong inspired me on LinkedIn to look at that more closely. And if you look at the service cloud and some of the low-code, no-code they got going on, you're starting to see the construction of a real scalable platform. The service cloud's got some innovations, data integration with generative AI to your point, you just mentioned that. It's a huge discussion. The data cloud's going to allow that. Again, MK's out there talking to George about the next-gen platform. Again, flow building, operational efficiency in the financial sector, guardrails and data governance. They're working to create an entire expanded application portfolio, is what I focused on. And why I did that, and this is where I want to get your reaction to, is that Salesforce has an opportunity to change the game. Not withstanding their own transformation around licensing, how they do their business model, but from a technical perspective, from a customer perspective, they get the keys to the kingdom. They don't have to rule the world and cloud and distributed computing. They can just be a key center. And we saw Oracle with Larry Ellison last week, really talking about how he's embracing multiple cloud or super cloud. You're starting to see the beginning of an operating system in a distributed way. Salesforce could be a major system of record for these companies rather than this siloed stovepipe, as Dave Vellante would say, customer platform that's just hard to work with. So in any wave, if you can reduce the steps it takes to do something, make it simple and easy to use, and with Gen.ai with this glue layer, Salesforce has a huge opportunity with their platform to do this. So this could be them living the dream or they might have to call it nightmare force. They're in a scenario where they're going to win big or maybe have a huge setback. Again, this a key moment in time for Salesforce. Your reaction?

Christophe Bertrand

>> It's about the data and data is the business. So I think that's pretty much the net-net. I like to always take a step back and bring it back to the reality. And you're right. I think if they can deliver on not just Gen.ai, I think AI in general, as this capability within the platform to let the ecosystem fully participate and in the end, create more independence, economy and operational efficiency to your earlier point, for the end user, that's the name of the game. But not just that, there are a number of enablers along the way. ISVs, professional services organizations that actually need a bunch of tools. So the tooling is maybe what we need to talk about in time to get to that nirvana of being the one source of truth and being the platform that holds that. And you're right after that is multi-cloud, is . And I would say in some cases I could make an argument, maybe some things should at some point, come back not on-prem, but in a very controlled governed type of environment for compliance reasons.

>> Yeah. One of the things that's interesting, I didn't have enough information to post in my post today. I didn't have enough research formed yet, but it's the impact of the developer community and the impact of communities in general. Salesforce has been exceptional with communities. They got the Trailblazer community. They've been decades of experience in nurturing their customer base. So they have a huge engaged community. On the dev side, the low-code, no-code gives them opportunity. But what I want to get your thoughts on, and this is something that we're watching and if anyone has an opinion, please DM me. I'm doing big stories on this. They got Heroku, which is the OG of the cloud. If you look at Heroku, this cloud-native platform, you got all this other connective tissue like MuleSoft, okay, they've been here on theCUBE, they're coming through the system here. So MuleSoft, Heroku, Salesforce, Data Cloud, they got all the puzzle pieces. Can they get those devs? So I think the Heroku piece is going to be something that's going to be interesting because the cloud-native developer world of KubeCon, CNCF, that market's tooling up to be the foundational piece of it because all this will run on cloud-native, the infrastructure's coming in. We're expecting Jensen on stage, Marc Benioff of course, is going to be a big, got more GPUs, we got more all the stuff powering Gen.ai. But the critical work is going to be at the cloud-native foundation and then this data layer. So devs community, areas that could go either way for Salesforce, your reaction to that.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It feels like history all over again. We've seen that show before. We've seen that story. You were mentioning Oracle, I can think of Oracle a few years ago, and that was exactly the same story. You would've asked exactly the same question and see what happened and it really worked out. So I think it has been the case since mainframe. So, the big difference though is this. One thing you haven't mentioned is scale. Everything you've said has been true through the cycles of technology we've seen, but scale has been the one thing that changes. So I think to me, the real test will be scale and can you actually scale the data so that you can actually use it and reuse it, the tooling we talked about. So yeah, I think they have the component. You're right. Is it a bit of a puzzle right now? Certainly is.

>> If they're monolithic though, this is going to be the challenge because Salesforce is going to have no problem running on Salesforce. By the way, speaking of Oracle, when theCUBE started 15 years ago, I was here when Marc Benioff protested his keynote and had a keynote here at the St. Regis and Marc, if you remember, if you're watching, I covered that and live-streamed it on Justin TV, pre-Twitch in the front row was a really epic moment. It was a really big deal. But now, Salesforce has its own infrastructure, but it's this ecosystem. The cloud native is a distributed computing paradigm. So I think you're going to start to see Salesforce have to get into new swim lane with cloud native. And again, the low-code, no-code is key. And again, applications will determine what's real.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Not applications. Use cases.

>> Use cases, exactly.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Businesses think in terms of data and use cases. At the end of the day, it's about the money. It's about the data. And data's the money, data's the business.

>> Christophe, what are you working on now? What's your big focus? What's getting you excited? What's that fire in your stomach? What's going on?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, I love data, I love data protection. I love ransomware, not love ransomware. I love to talk about it. It's a terrible thing.

>> How to prevent it.

Christophe Bertrand

>> But we need to build more cyber resilience. And by the way, that's a topic that also applies across the Salesforce environment. Again, probably more focused on data protection and backup recovery. But those are very, very high. Very important topic topics. The other thing is I'd like to know more about high availability. Should disasters strike, what's the solution? How do you become highly available beyond what the protections and the services Salesforce provide? And these are questions that are hard to answer. So these are the areas.

>> You know that's my two favorite words is high availability and highly available. There's a difference.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Oh, very-

>> Gen.ai latency is everything. Command and control, the edge, big topics. Again, sovereign cloud, cyber resilience. This crosses over with security and also governance for you.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. And compliance. At the end of the day, the biggest driver is going to be that carrot and compliance is just that for you.

>> If the apps don't have the data and it's not compliance and governance, it's not going to work. All right, I'm John Furrier. We're here in San Francisco for exclusive coverage of Salesforce's Dreamforce. Here we got Salesforce living the dream here in San Francisco, bringing Gen.ai and Agentic systems as this next application tsunami comes in, it's Cambrian explosion. We're going to see all kinds of new invention, new innovations in the ecosystem and within developers. So stay tuned for more wall-to-wall coverage. Thanks for watching.

AnalystANGLE | theCUBE Research

search

>> Hello, welcome to theCUBE coverage here in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with theCUBE Research Analyst, Christophe Bertrand, who's with me here in San Francisco. Dreamforce is happening, it's getting going. We are getting it off the ground here in theCUBE. Got great wall-to-wall coverage. Again, this event is turning into quite the ecosystem event gen AI event. Salesforce has always been hampered by the reputation of having multiple disparate systems through acquisitions, multiple platforms not working well together. So this Dreamforce could be Salesforce living the dream, bringing it all together and building those abstraction layers and making gen AI be the glue layer, so to speak, to bring it all together to abstract away all the complexity, reduce the steps it takes to get things done. We're going to wait to see all the announcements in the keynote. Christophe, great to see you and thanks for coming in with team today. Full team coverage here in San Francisco.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah, nice to be here. Absolutely.

>> The big genesis, you heard my little monologue intros is that Salesforce has been hampered with the reputation and they got such a great business and obviously continues to thunder along in performance, but now, this is a dream scenario for them, pun intended, at Dreamforce with Agentic systems hitting the scene and pulling all that data together because Salesforce, although has disparate systems, has tons of data. They got to use the data, they got to get agents out there, they got to protect the data. So it is a perfect scenario for them to be the poster child of how gen AI could transform an existing giant into a mega giant.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. And you'll see this in our coverage. We had a great conversation with a customer this morning, a smaller sized company, but they were able, in a matter of weeks or months, to actually leverage the capabilities of AI and Gen AI in Salesforce on their own without having to go to a complex type of process with an external integrator. So I think there is definitely a lot going on. There are lots of obviously announcements around Agentforce and that's going to be absolutely key. The ability to also talk to one of their partners in the ecosystem. It is going to be about AI for sure.

>> We know that. Marc Benioff has always has his finger on the pulse and he's literally on... I've been watching his career for over a decade and a half now, close. He is on every wave and he implements it. Sometimes, they become a little bit hype, but okay, either way, he's got a good nose for the waves. Agentic, I think he's got a good call here, thinking Agentic force and bringing agents because I think that will help them. Your research has been over the years, deep in data, protecting data. Ransomware has been a big attack. As Salesforce puts this system together, one of the things they have to be careful of, as all their customers is, you now have systems connecting through APIs, ecosystem partners, all these alliances. There's a lot of connective tissue that's underway of being reset or repurposed or refactored. How do you see that? Because the game is still the same. You've got data protection, cyber resilience, securing that data is huge and also using that data and replicating it, these are storage paradigms moving to Gen AI.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. And one of the things that's key here is to remember that there is a bulk API and that bulk API actually has been an interesting way of protecting data within Salesforce. Now, not everybody is necessarily doing it the same way, and I would say, this is a perfect question because of the recent announcement of the acquisition of OwnBackup or OWN, how they used to be called OwnBackup, now OWN by Salesforce, which actually begs a few questions. Number one is they have tried a couple of times to actually get into that data protection space, backup and recovery space, yet that didn't quite work. They have, of course, in a sense, pushed the problem back to customers by having an ecosystem of players like ODA, Seva, Veeam, others, Haiku, et cetera, play as the solution. Yet, now, what is the message? So I think I'm going to be looking for indications in terms of what's next for this acquisition. Obviously, it's a bit early to say, it has to close, but what it says is this, to your point, data is very critical and when you spend a couple of billion on protecting data, it's because you really care about it. Now, Gen.ai is only going to accelerate that requirement. Why? Because you mentioned it. It's about the essence of the business. It's about automating workflows. It's about leveraging all of that data that maybe you're actually not using today. So guess what? A lot of people are probably underplaying their hands with their data right now. I think the promise here of Gen.ai is, and AI in general within Salesforce, protected correctly, is that it will bring a lot of automations and a lot of great things to the table.

>> I had interviewed last year, Alice Steinglass, she's the EVP. She talked about responsible use of Gen.ai over a year ago, and that's a big focus here at Salesforce's is Dreamforce this year. Guardrails and data governance is a huge discussion because it's one of those things where it's not a sexy mainstream conversation, but when you think about Agentic systems and agents and sub-agents, I could see George and MK who runs NextGen platform for Salesforce, about to come on theCUBE next. His whole job is to make this platform horizontally scalable, yet domain specific with the data. So to let that data fly, you need to have really new kinds of governance, new cataloging and those guardrails because you have now multiple dimensions. You got sovereign cloud, you got geography, you got regions. So this is a complicated thing, and what Alice at Salesforce talked about is you have to have trust in the AI. How do you see that evolving? Because as you look at the data from the bottoms up, application developers just want to be abstracted away from the complexity. So all that data has to move on its own and be intelligent. Remember, drift and hallucinations is the big problem. They got to be smarter. What's your take on that?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, let me go back to the basics here. First of all, there's no AI or leveraging of data that there itself is not compliant and you have to know... And in order to do that, you have to know what data you have and where it is across the board because there are a number of integrations, APIs from other sources into Salesforce and out of Salesforce. So let's start with that. And I would say, once we get that done, which is a big, big ask, really, to start, then I think you can get into the next step, which is, okay, now how do I really use this to augment what I know about my environment? I think there's a lot to do around augmentation, for sure. And you're right. I think the other question is how do you then not trust so much the AI but trust the data? Let's start with that. For me, it's about data trust, starting with very proper data management, responsible data management, compliant data management. That's going to be the price to pay before you can get into any fancy AI, in my opinion.

>> Yeah, Christophe, this highlights, to your point you just brought up, I want to bring this to the table, is with this new Gen.ai wave, it's a new category we're seeing that obviously, you've seen Nvidia and the hardware's hot, I've see category changeover. When you think about things that are important, operational efficiency becomes huge. So when you look at Salesforce and as they're evolving, one of the things that's really accelerating for this company is the fact that they're now having a lot more innovation in the ecosystem. You're starting to see them partner with AWS, the cloud providers, and again, you mentioned data's coming in and out of Salesforce, so we're talking about third party probably through APIs and other connectors, but this creates this idea that I got to create operational efficiency. So one, I want to get your thoughts on that. And then two, there's two schools of thought right now around this, you're seeing a trend where, oh, we're going to get rid of Salesforce and CRM systems and build our own. So you got this build your own mentality from a cost structure standpoint, but yet, you have this incumbent data position with Salesforce where if you get that operational platform right, the benefits are huge. So this is causing a huge surge of innovation inside the ecosystem. Not only ecosystem, ISVs, they build on top of platforms, but when you bring the notion up of talking to each other in real time at application speed for Gen.ai, that's a game changer in the sense of architecture. What's your thoughts on one, the ecosystem innovation equation with Salesforce in the marketplace and two, operational efficiency versus this build my own versus leverage existing?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, I think to build my own versus leveraging what's already there is pretty easy question to answer. So I'm not-

>> Okay answer then.

Christophe Bertrand

>> I'm not even going to go there. It's super simple. I think the question is first of all, what is your experience on Salesforce? What are you doing? I had a great example earlier today when we spoke with a client of Salesforce that really started by just dealing with leads and then got into the whole ERP platform and operating the business on Salesforce. And of course, now getting into Gen.ai and augmented type of use cases. And what I took away from it was the efficiency that was built in was tremendous. They were able to change their ability to manage their inventory. Go straight to the bottom line and customer experience. So the customers are happier because of their ability to inform them with emails of their status of their order and more. There's a lot more we discussed. Definitely a segment you should take a look at. I will say that's the first point of operational efficiency, as long as, of course, you know what you're doing and you work within the parameters of your business, understanding your workflows and translating them into the existing tools, you don't necessarily need a lot of customization within Salesforce to get a great job done. Now, it's not always the case. Larger the organization, the more complex it can get. Number two, I think go back to the point we made earlier around data. It's really about data. You have to have the goods in order to really reap the benefits of the platform. Another great example we heard was what can be done with Agentic AI and some announcements around agent force, especially around the professional services world, and definitely had a great conversation on this topic as well. I think it's going to get better, but for some, it may get a little worse before it gets better.

>> So folks watching, check out Christophe's research, he's doing some great work in this area. Again, super important. It's in the key areas that are where the innovation is. Okay, on the question of the innovation ecosystem, what's your thoughts? You've seen ecosystems over decades, multiple ways of innovation. What's your take on this one? Is it maybe being over optimistic or over excited by this change? What's your take on this ecosystem? It's a completely different power dynamic than we've seen before.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, is it an ecosystem or ecosystems? Because-

>> I would say both. Yeah.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah, it's both. And really, it depends on the topic. You have such a wide variety of players and partners, not just in what they do as a business, but also, in terms of themes around data, around Salesforce. I mentioned earlier, data protection, that's one ecosystem and it goes on and on. So I think it's a very, very healthy, very wide ecosystem. The promise of AI is to simplify, I think, the integration or the functioning of the various moving parts, and I think that's really what it comes down to. Automation, simplification, giving, at the end of the day, a customer more independence and autonomy. This being said, I think the architectural question that comes into play is how much you want to rely on APIs versus running native to an extent, which is a conversation we also had earlier. So I think this is one of the topics that will probably in time, become more critical because the more APIs, the more complexity, potentially. Although AI could help abstract that complexity.

>> I think the ecosystem's plural is the right answer and I think that you're right on the money. I think this is a great time. theCUBE will be covering this innovation in the ecosystem. So you'll see a lot more content come from us around partners, alliances, how they all work together from a deep tech perspective. Christophe, I wrote a post this morning around this event and setting the table with some content that we had before. Also, a teaser of what to expect. The title was Salesforce Living the Dreamforce Revolutionizing Business Workflows and Data Governance. By the way, if you like theCUBE and you like the free research at thecubereach.com, go check us out and engage with the content. It's free. We do this service to provide benefit to the community. If you're interested in being a creator and collaborating with us, join theCUBE Collective, go to that site, check it out. We do this for you, the audience, and we love doing it. So thanks for engaging with us. Appreciate you. Christophe, so my notes here were basically like, the landscape is changing, they're adding to their portfolio, customization, personalization, big paragraph on that with some great videos from Alice Steinglass and others, enhancing the sales cloud. Remember the data cloud is a huge part of it. Amber Armstrong inspired me on LinkedIn to look at that more closely. And if you look at the service cloud and some of the low-code, no-code they got going on, you're starting to see the construction of a real scalable platform. The service cloud's got some innovations, data integration with generative AI to your point, you just mentioned that. It's a huge discussion. The data cloud's going to allow that. Again, MK's out there talking to George about the next-gen platform. Again, flow building, operational efficiency in the financial sector, guardrails and data governance. They're working to create an entire expanded application portfolio, is what I focused on. And why I did that, and this is where I want to get your reaction to, is that Salesforce has an opportunity to change the game. Not withstanding their own transformation around licensing, how they do their business model, but from a technical perspective, from a customer perspective, they get the keys to the kingdom. They don't have to rule the world and cloud and distributed computing. They can just be a key center. And we saw Oracle with Larry Ellison last week, really talking about how he's embracing multiple cloud or super cloud. You're starting to see the beginning of an operating system in a distributed way. Salesforce could be a major system of record for these companies rather than this siloed stovepipe, as Dave Vellante would say, customer platform that's just hard to work with. So in any wave, if you can reduce the steps it takes to do something, make it simple and easy to use, and with Gen.ai with this glue layer, Salesforce has a huge opportunity with their platform to do this. So this could be them living the dream or they might have to call it nightmare force. They're in a scenario where they're going to win big or maybe have a huge setback. Again, this a key moment in time for Salesforce. Your reaction?

Christophe Bertrand

>> It's about the data and data is the business. So I think that's pretty much the net-net. I like to always take a step back and bring it back to the reality. And you're right. I think if they can deliver on not just Gen.ai, I think AI in general, as this capability within the platform to let the ecosystem fully participate and in the end, create more independence, economy and operational efficiency to your earlier point, for the end user, that's the name of the game. But not just that, there are a number of enablers along the way. ISVs, professional services organizations that actually need a bunch of tools. So the tooling is maybe what we need to talk about in time to get to that nirvana of being the one source of truth and being the platform that holds that. And you're right after that is multi-cloud, is . And I would say in some cases I could make an argument, maybe some things should at some point, come back not on-prem, but in a very controlled governed type of environment for compliance reasons.

>> Yeah. One of the things that's interesting, I didn't have enough information to post in my post today. I didn't have enough research formed yet, but it's the impact of the developer community and the impact of communities in general. Salesforce has been exceptional with communities. They got the Trailblazer community. They've been decades of experience in nurturing their customer base. So they have a huge engaged community. On the dev side, the low-code, no-code gives them opportunity. But what I want to get your thoughts on, and this is something that we're watching and if anyone has an opinion, please DM me. I'm doing big stories on this. They got Heroku, which is the OG of the cloud. If you look at Heroku, this cloud-native platform, you got all this other connective tissue like MuleSoft, okay, they've been here on theCUBE, they're coming through the system here. So MuleSoft, Heroku, Salesforce, Data Cloud, they got all the puzzle pieces. Can they get those devs? So I think the Heroku piece is going to be something that's going to be interesting because the cloud-native developer world of KubeCon, CNCF, that market's tooling up to be the foundational piece of it because all this will run on cloud-native, the infrastructure's coming in. We're expecting Jensen on stage, Marc Benioff of course, is going to be a big, got more GPUs, we got more all the stuff powering Gen.ai. But the critical work is going to be at the cloud-native foundation and then this data layer. So devs community, areas that could go either way for Salesforce, your reaction to that.

Christophe Bertrand

>> It feels like history all over again. We've seen that show before. We've seen that story. You were mentioning Oracle, I can think of Oracle a few years ago, and that was exactly the same story. You would've asked exactly the same question and see what happened and it really worked out. So I think it has been the case since mainframe. So, the big difference though is this. One thing you haven't mentioned is scale. Everything you've said has been true through the cycles of technology we've seen, but scale has been the one thing that changes. So I think to me, the real test will be scale and can you actually scale the data so that you can actually use it and reuse it, the tooling we talked about. So yeah, I think they have the component. You're right. Is it a bit of a puzzle right now? Certainly is.

>> If they're monolithic though, this is going to be the challenge because Salesforce is going to have no problem running on Salesforce. By the way, speaking of Oracle, when theCUBE started 15 years ago, I was here when Marc Benioff protested his keynote and had a keynote here at the St. Regis and Marc, if you remember, if you're watching, I covered that and live-streamed it on Justin TV, pre-Twitch in the front row was a really epic moment. It was a really big deal. But now, Salesforce has its own infrastructure, but it's this ecosystem. The cloud native is a distributed computing paradigm. So I think you're going to start to see Salesforce have to get into new swim lane with cloud native. And again, the low-code, no-code is key. And again, applications will determine what's real.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Not applications. Use cases.

>> Use cases, exactly.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Businesses think in terms of data and use cases. At the end of the day, it's about the money. It's about the data. And data's the money, data's the business.

>> Christophe, what are you working on now? What's your big focus? What's getting you excited? What's that fire in your stomach? What's going on?

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, I love data, I love data protection. I love ransomware, not love ransomware. I love to talk about it. It's a terrible thing.

>> How to prevent it.

Christophe Bertrand

>> But we need to build more cyber resilience. And by the way, that's a topic that also applies across the Salesforce environment. Again, probably more focused on data protection and backup recovery. But those are very, very high. Very important topic topics. The other thing is I'd like to know more about high availability. Should disasters strike, what's the solution? How do you become highly available beyond what the protections and the services Salesforce provide? And these are questions that are hard to answer. So these are the areas.

>> You know that's my two favorite words is high availability and highly available. There's a difference.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Oh, very-

>> Gen.ai latency is everything. Command and control, the edge, big topics. Again, sovereign cloud, cyber resilience. This crosses over with security and also governance for you.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Absolutely. And compliance. At the end of the day, the biggest driver is going to be that carrot and compliance is just that for you.

>> If the apps don't have the data and it's not compliance and governance, it's not going to work. All right, I'm John Furrier. We're here in San Francisco for exclusive coverage of Salesforce's Dreamforce. Here we got Salesforce living the dream here in San Francisco, bringing Gen.ai and Agentic systems as this next application tsunami comes in, it's Cambrian explosion. We're going to see all kinds of new invention, new innovations in the ecosystem and within developers. So stay tuned for more wall-to-wall coverage. Thanks for watching.