Salesforce Working On Blockchain Product That Could Be Ready For Annual Conference

Salesforce co-founders Marc Benioff and Parker Harris told Business Insider in a recent interview that the company is currently developing a blockchain product.

TechCrunch, citing the video interview, reported that Benioff said he was prompted to start thinking about deploying blockchain for its family of products after attending the World Economic Forum. Turned out there was a crypto conference going on at the same time, and one of the attendees of the latter talked to Benioff about blockchain — and that got him thinking, reported TechCrunch. “I had been thinking a lot about what is Salesforce’s strategy around blockchain, and what is Salesforce’s strategy around cryptocurrencies, and how will we relate to all of these things,” Benioff said. That one conversation resulted in him thinking more about blockchain and how Salesforce can play a role in developing the technology. Finally, after pondering it for a while, he came up with a way to enter the blockchain market — which Salesforce hopes to unveil at Dreamforce, its annual customer conference, being held from Sept. 25-28 in San Francisco. “A lot [these ideas] comes from paying attention, listening. There’s new ideas coming all the time,” he said. “That’s kind of how it works, and I hope by Dreamforce we will have a blockchain and cryptocurrency solution.”

Blockchain isn’t the only area Salesforce is focusing on, announcing in March an acquisition of CloudCraze, the enterprise eCommerce startup. In a blog post, Ray Grady, president and chief customer officer at CloudCraze, said the company’s B2B commerce platform — which is built on Salesforce’s cloud platform — enables companies to provide personalized experiences for business customers as they make purchases over the Internet. According to Grady, with the B2B commerce market set to hit $1.2 trillion by 2021 — up from $889 billion today — its important for businesses to capture the opportunity, which can be done via personalization. With CloudCraze as part of the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, he said Salesforce customers can shift to digital commerce and enable business buyers to shop and purchase online as easily as consumers do.