CapTech’s Key Takeaways from Dreamforce 2022

CapTech’s Salesforce team was lucky enough to be among the 40,000 attendees of Dreamforce 2022, which Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff referred to as a ‘family reunion’ after virtual events in 2020 and 2021. This year’s Dreamforce provided no shortage of excitement and announcements, and even sprinkled in a little “magic.” Here are the highlights from our week with the Salesforce Ohana.

Genie

The biggest announcement during Dreamforce centered around Genie, described by Salesforce as a “real-time platform for customer magic.” Genie powers a host of new features, further building on the Customer Data Platform, which enables real-time integrations across thousands of customer applications. Genie enhances the Customer 360 in new actionable ways across the platform by leveraging the Hyperforce public cloud infrastructure. It is easy to build declaratively with built-in connectors and expands the power of platform staples like Einstein and Flow for interactions, recommendations, and automation across enterprises in real-time.

MuleSoft

MuleSoft also played a role in some of Salesforce’s announcements. Salesforce Genie is powered by MuleSoft, while Salesforce Flow integration is powered by MuleSoft Composer. This is great news for MuleSoft, and having such a high volume “customer” will likely yield new and improved functionality, along with performance improvements.

Additionally, MuleSoft officially launched its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) product, MuleSoft RPA, which adds a convenient RPA level on top of Anypoint Platform and Composer. This is a welcome addition for existing MuleSoft clients without an RPA tool. Clients with existing RPA tools may wish to evaluate the new product with respect to existing investments.

MuleSoft also demoed its new Anypoint Code Builder, a web-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for MuleSoft development. This tool should increase uptake by non-Java developers as the current Eclipse-based IDE does not meet expectations for a modern development environment.

Finally, there were also announcements about the new Anypoint Connector for Customer Data Platform (CDP) and CloudHub 2.0. Both bring new functionality that should be useful, and we look forward to testing these out in the future.

Slack

Slack was featured prominently at Dreamforce, signaling that Salesforce is heavily integrating, and betting on, this acquisition. Slack is positioned as a ‘Digital HQ’ with the new Slack Canvas at the center. Canvas is a collaborative space that brings together data and media across multiple platforms. Interesting use cases could include an onboarding canvas with channels to join, forms to fill out, people to meet with, and Trailhead modules to take; or a canvas for an Account that includes Salesforce opportunities, cases, and contacts along with meeting preparation, talking points, and YouTube videos.

Along with being its own platform, Slack is also being integrated more deeply across Salesforce. This includes surfacing Sales Cloud and Service Cloud data directly in Slack and enabling users to take action or update records directly from Slack. Slack is also being further integrated into Flow, making data more accessible to users, and providing actionable insights at their fingertips.

Lastly, the Apex SDK for Slack is being piloted, enabling development teams to imagine and build their own collaboration use cases across the Salesforce platforms.

Summary

Historically, MuleSoft, Tableau, and Slack have operated fairly independently, but it seems like that is changing based on what we’ve seen at Dreamforce. These acquisitions are being integrated into the Salesforce core in a way that strengthens all of them in a thoughtful manner. With this shift, it’s more important than ever for clients to evaluate the full set of capabilities holistically, even though there are likely multiple business owners. While it still needs to be proven in client projects, we are excited to see the culmination of this integration.

If you missed Dreamforce in person, all of the keynotes and many of the sessions are available on Salesforce+. Our team is personally looking forward to using Genie and MuleSoft to power customer journeys and deeper enterprise integration for our clients. To learn more about CapTech’s partnership with Salesforce, visit our website here.