This year, Americaneagle.com joined the Salesforce trailblazer community that descended on Chicago for the 2018 Salesforce Connections event. The event, which took place at McCormick Place on June 12 - 14th, was packed full of content, workshops, and breakout sessions which centered on the ever growing Salesforce platform.
As interest in the Salesforce platform has increased, so too has the number of requests we receive to work with our customers implementing Salesforce at their organization. Conferences such as Salesforce Connections are a great way for us as an implementer, to stay current on the latest offerings provided by Salesforce.
Several of the recent acquisitions by Salesforce proved to be particularly interesting to us (and we expect to our customers as well):
Salesforce Integration Cloud (formerly Mulesoft)
The new integration cloud offering by Salesforce enables customers to seamlessly connect disparate systems to each other with a standardized way. Data is exposed from each of the various systems through a modern API provided by Mulesoft, which takes away much of the complexity from each of the various systems, and also standardizes the integration for the implementer with each integration point using the same infrastructure. A full list of the available connectors is available here: https://www.mulesoft.com/exchange/
Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware)
Commerce Cloud enables retailers to take advantage of the full suite of Salesforce products, including Einstein (the analytics platform), to create great shopping experiences. The platform provides the tooling to support retailers from both a physical and digital standpoint. Mobile application support, multi-language support, and B2B support (see below) all create a great experience for both shoppers and administrators. One of the favorite aspects of Commerce Cloud, from the Americaneagle.com standpoint, is that the platform is extensible to meet the needs of each individual retailer, which allows to capitalize on our extensive e-commerce experience and fully take advantage of the opportunity it presents.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud B2B (CloudCraze)
B2B commerce is growing at a fast rate. Forrester estimates that B2B e-commerce will top $1.1 trillion and account for 12.1% of all B2B sales in the US by 2020. That estimate is nearly 2x their predicted B2C e-commerce market size ($480 billion).
The CloudCraze acquisition enables B2B commerce on the Salesforce platform. Account hierarchies, contract pricing, custom catalogs, and multiple payment types are all features that are part of the new B2B Commerce offering.
Conclusion
We continue to be impressed at the speed which Salesforce is moving. Recent acquisitions have even increased that pace. We really enjoyed our time at the conference, and learned a lot about the upcoming features. We plan to use these insights and new platform opportunities to enable the customers we work with as well, to allow their businesses to take advantage of all the new technology being offered both today and in the future.
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