As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission ) as part of my Analyst Cam series.
This time it is Jujhar Singh, EVP and GM, Salesforce Industries. He presents an update on their vertical clouds – he presented last year in the Burning Platform series
He covers a wide range of industries. He drills into micro-verticals within Financial Services, one of their strong focus areas, talking about Rocket Mortgage and investment banking. How they are helping government agencies reinvent themselves. How Slack and conversational interfaces are influencing higher ed and healthcare. How their own experiences with nonprofits and internal experience with philanthropy and net zero programs are helping verticalize ESG for various sectors. How their anonymized data across 150,000 customers in the cloud and Einstein AI are allowing for “Insights” – like a Shopping Index from over a billion shoppers and Pandemic Insights for Manufacturing. It is allowing them to move customers to more ‘impact-based” thinking – their version of “outcomes”
I like how he emphasizes their ISV, hyperscaler and SI partners. His colleague Tyler Prince had spent much longer on their ecosystem here. Throughout the session you see the state of the economy – hybrid, working, shopping, learning from anywhere from an industry lens.
I like how he responds to my question about the vertical competitive landscape. He says “the more the merrier” and it is "heartening" that competitors are validating what Salesforce has been executing for the last few years. That reminded me of the Pulitzer Prize winning "The Soul Of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It described an ad that Data General produced but never ran. It read:
"They Say IBM's Entry into Minicomputers Will Legitimize the Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome"
Jujhar is too polite to say that but he does a really nice job in half an hour given the wide scope he covers.
