Back to the Core....what does that mean?

At DreamForce it was announced that SalesForce to take this year to focus on its products and enhancing them.  In some ways this is a focus on the core again. 

As of late SalesForce has been busy acquiring companies and hastily integrating the various platforms into the SalesForce universe. The problem is that many of these integrations were hastily integrated and don't do everything that the end user expects. For example, the first integration of the Work.com (performance management suite) lacked the ability to really move data from Work.com into SalesForce. It took another two iterations of the tool to get a comprehensive set of tools.  Now you can't really tell where work.com stops and SalesForce CRM really starts, or ends.  Which is what you would expect when you hear that a new acquisition is built into the core system. 

So for the next year SalesForce has stated they are going to fix this with their many other acquisitions. For example, we can expect the Marketing Cloud to become a strong tool where everything integrates with one another and there is no obvious distinction between ExactTarget (email marketing tool) and Radian6 (social media tool). It will also soon integrate with the Sales and Service Clouds which will give endless email marketing opportunities. 

We can also see this focus on the core in the recent Lightning release. Rather than the SalesForce core UI looking dated and noticeably behind the mobile experience, it is beginning to look more modern and what we expect from software available in the cloud.  It will be interesting to see how Lightning continues to evolve as the first release was very Sales Cloud focuses. 

Regardless hopefully SalesForce better integrates their many acquisitions to give us a comprehensive tool that really does everything we need, while also fixing those odd nuisances in the core application that have always driven users crazy. It should be an interesting year in the world of SalesForce.