Parker Harris, the co-founder of cloud software giant Salesforce, confirmed that the company is hoping to unveil Blockchain and cryptocurrency support by September 2018, in an interview at the TrailheaDX conference April 5.
“I hope that by [our annual conference] Dreamforce we will have a Blockchain and cryptocurrency solution for Salesforce and for all of our customers.”
Benioff explained he became interested in Blockchain after a serendipitous encounter in Switzerland, where he was ironically attending the rather crypto-skeptic World Economic Forum. Benioff shared his Swiss hotel with an attendee at a parallel cryptocurrency conference, who engaged him in a conversation.
“I had been thinking a lot about what is Salesforce’s strategy around Blockchain, and what is Salesforce’s strategies around cryptocurrencies and how will we relate to all of these things.”
Salesforce generated almost $8.4 bln in revenue in 2017, and is best known for its cloud solutions for customer relationship management (CRM) in various industries, including healthcare, finance, media, retail, and manufacturing.
At a recent briefing for its Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software, the company praised “revolutionary” distributed ledger technology for its potential to “verify and maintain contracts, send transactions, and automate trust.”
Further details of Salesforce’s concrete plans are yet to emerge: “A lot [of these ideas] come from paying attention, listening. There [are] new ideas coming all the time,” Benioff concluded.
Cointelegraph recently ran an expert-take piece on the implications of Blockchain tech for the existing cloud storage ecosystem, which is currently a “near-trillion dollar” industry. In late 2017, Genaro unveiled plans to launch a public Blockchain with a fully integrated decentralized storage network.
Blockchain tech veteran Storj has long been active on the scene, and Cointelegraph also reported on a more recent initiative PressCoin, which is attempting to leverage Blockchain tech to bring together cloud-based publishing and big data in order to rehaul the existing global news and advertising systems.