Salesforce Revamps Community Cloud Following Profit Results

On the brink of potentially being bought, business software provider Salesforce has added one more weapon to its cloud armoury in the form of a revamped Community Cloud platform.

With the update, Salesforce’s Community Cloud brings features such as improved data analytics, more community tools, and the ability to use Salesforce Files Connect with Google Drive.

The release came as the firm reported its financial results this week. Salesforce announced first quarter revenues of $1.51bn, up 23 percent from the previous year. Net income stood at $4.1m, Salesforce’s first profit in seven quarters.

Trusted

“We’re the sixth largest software company in the world,” boasted Keith Block, Salesforce’s Vice Chairman, at today’s Salesforce World Tour in London.

“We have the world’s most trusted enterprise cloud. And trust is everything. One of the things we’re seeing in cloud is this incredible adoption, and that measures itself in transaction numbers.”

Block highlighted Salesforce’s 79 percent Q1 transaction growth and the firm’s 11 planned data centres around the world, saying that one of things the company was seeing in the cloud space “is this incredible adoption, and that measures itself in transaction numbers”.

In a statement about the cloud release, Nasi Jazayeri, Community Cloud VP at Salesforce, said: “Communities have become the connective tissue linking customers, partners and employees to companies and each other. With the next generation Community Cloud, companies have the intelligence, speed and engagement to strengthen those bonds like never before.”

Targeted Recommendations

One of the highlights of the cloud update is a feature called ‘Targeted Recommendations’. Salesforce said it uses algorithms to analyse structured and unstructured data to provide relevant content.

“The new feature identifies experts by understanding the quality of a user’s contributions, then surfaces her as a subject matter expert and recommends her to other community members,” said Salesforce.

What Salesforce has done here is take the idea of a community and extend it with Salesforce integration and analytics.

The company gave journalists customer examples of Community Cloud use. One of those customers was Sky, which said it uses Community Cloud to “drive engagement among people”.

“Sky is evolving its community from a systems of engagement to a system of intelligence where topics are modelled from what is top of mind within the community,” said Sky.

It’s all fairly abstract, but that’s part and parcel of companies who are trying to realign their working habits to meet the way they have to work with the cloud against faster moving competitors.

The Community Cloud updates are free, if you already have a Community Cloud license.

Take our cloud computing quiz here!