This afternoon’s keynote, featuring Salesforce Co-Founders Marc Benioff and Parker Harris, got off to a rocking start — literally. After a surprise performance by Stevie Wonder to kick things off, Benioff and Harris discussed the future of big, BIG data and gave audience members a live demo of Lightning Experience, the new platform user interface for Sales Cloud. Here’s what grabbed our attention. 

The data revolution is happening — now.
With the explosion of the Internet of Things, the growth of interconnected devices, and the trillions of analyzable customer moments they facilitate, we have a ton of data on our hands. Benioff opened his keynote with some staggering statistics: by 2020, there will be 6 billion smartphones in use worldwide and 3 billion social users worldwide. Marc Zuckerberg recently reported that there are over 1 billion Facebook users every day. In fact, 90% of the world’s data was created in the past 12 months. But even more astounding? Less than 1% of all of that data — including the trillions of customer touchpoints — has been analyzed. 

As reported in our fourth annual The State of Salesforce Report, data is the biggest issue companies face today. An overwhelming 76% of companies struggle with data integration and quality. Analyzing data in real-time, in one place, is a huge obstacle for many. But as we saw with today’s live demo, the new Lightning Experience is taking steps to help companies wrangle their data. 

First of all, we experienced, first-hand, how easy it is to switch from the current Salesforce1 platform to Lightning Experience — in just one click. What excited us most, however, was how easy it is to customize the user interface, in real time, in order to view your data, in real time. For example, Lightning lets you modify and personalize dashboards (now available with three times as many columns), view live sales activity feeds, and drag-and-drop components from the Salesforce ecosystem with Lightning Builder to modify your screens, ensuring you see the right customer data for you. Plus, the visualization of lists and charts, a favorite feature of Analytics Cloud, is now available for Lightning Experience, making it easier to get a full view of your customer. 

Want to learn more about how the best companies use Salesforce to take control of their data? Download our fourth annual The State of Salesforce Report or register for our webcast to hear six Bluewolf experts discuss key trends from the report.