SEPTEMBER 30, 2015
As some of you may be aware Hexagon Metrology, for the second year in a row, was invited to participate at the Developer Zone at Dreamforce, one of the largest software trade shows in the world.
Actual registration exceeded 170,000 attendees. Salesforce practically takes over roughly 14 different venues. For comparison’s sake, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is held in one of those 14 buildings, actually on one floor in one of those buildings.
People might ask why we were there. After our showing last year, Salesforce was interested in piloting a new product through cooperation with us.
This new product was announced at the main keynote, and it is IoT Cloud. IoT Cloud is a new way of connecting to IoT devices via Salesforce platform and directly feeding events from devices into the Salesforce environment.
This development coincided with our development of the MMS PULSE platform. We were able to leverage the development of our own IoT devices and our existing Salesforce ecosystem.
How does this all work in reality? Well, imagine if one of our MMS PULSE customers decided to install several hundred MMS PULSE devices. Those devices are recording the environmental conditions and watching for changes. As soon as an event occurs we push that event through a rules engine in IoT Cloud. Depending on what condition was set, the event essentially creates something referred to as Orchestration Flow, which says: if you see A happen then do B, similar to IFTTT, which many of us have on our phones. It is also as simple to build these orchestrations in IoT Cloud as it is to build little cases in IFTTT.
After the event goes through IoT Cloud it will create what Salesforce refers to as a ‘case’, in our internal Salesforce and/or Servicemax ecosystem. This lets us, over time, learn about the environments our machines operate in and gradually understand customer use behaviours. And this ultimately enables us to build a proactive, and eventually predictive, service engine. Over time we will have the ability to recognise that a machine needs service, even before the customer knows something is about to go wrong. This will help us drive design changes when needed and ultimately help deliver a superior customer experience to all the filed users of our equipment.
During the show, Christian Marks from our development group manned a 4.5.4 SF coordinate measuring machine (CMM) with MMS PULSE. We estimate that he talked to at least 100-150 people each day, some briefly and some for quite a while. We even collected a few leads, some for cooperation, some for actual follow-up – but mainly we were shown as a real example of IoT Cloud integration. Most people thought we were showing a 3D printer, but once we exposed them to what we were showing it generated great interest and awareness about Hexagon as a brand.
In addition, I was given an opportunity to present details of this cooperation at a Dreamforce session in front of roughly 50 people with another partner company, Temeda.
Finally, as a highlight of our Dreamforce, we had an opportunity to show our integration and explain what we do and how we do it to Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, and Adam Bosworth, CEO of IoT Cloud. Unfortunately, we only captured one of those events. We are looking forward to launching the MMS Pulse IoT Cloud product in early 2016 and possibly participating in Dreamforce ‘16. Being part of one of the biggest and most inspiring technology events in the world – now that’s shaping smart change.