Salesforce.com announced Thursday continued growth for the customer relationship platform, most especially with the release of Salesforce Wear support for Oculus, Jawbone, and a host of other wearables.
Salesforce Wear was announced earlier this year, a cloud platform that companies can use to deploy their very own apps that rely on wearable devices as their end points. It includes a Developer Pack that developers can use to accelerate the means by which companies connect with their customers with the help of wearable apps. The Salesforce Wear Developer Pack also features a sample code, demonstrations, reference apps, and documentation for a growing number of supported devices.
Salesforce Wear is already compatible with Android Wear, Fitbit, ARM, Google Glass, Nymi from Bionym, Myo from Thalmic, Pebble, Philips, Samsung Gear II, and OMSignal. It extended support to the smart glasses Epson Moverio, the fitness tracker Jawbone UP, the 3D smart glasses Meta Glasses, virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, and Android-based wearable display, communications, and computing system Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses.
Some of the demonstration apps Salesforce created include: 2lemetry (connects senior care patients to prompt assistance through a paired SafetyCare wearable device); Alpine Metrics (allows salespeople to view trends on wearable devices through Intelligent Forecasting); APX-Labs (enables field workers to use smart glass services); Brivo Labs (provides access using a person's unique cardiac rhythm); ClickSoftware (pairs with wearables to help employees accomplish tasks); Etherios (remote health monitoring); FacialNetwork (identifies faces instantly for personalized customer care); and Proximity Insight (notifies wearable users when a target comes within range).
"The explosive growth of Salesforce Wear has validated the need for a unified platform to bring together software companies, wearable device manufacturers and developers wanting to create apps that will enable companies to connect with customers in entirely new ways," said Salesforce.com senior vice president of emerging technologies, Daniel Debow.
Brent Blum, Accenture wearable technology practice lead, agrees, saying that his company believes wearable technology will be exciting to use not only for consumers but those in the enterprise as well as it will enable the most efficient way to accomplish tasks.
Gartner research director Roxane Edjlali further affirms this focus on wearable technology by writing in a report published on May 2014 that wearable devices will be driving 50 percent of overall mobile app interactions by 2017. "Mobile app data is often siloed, and IT leaders will find data from apps that use cloud-based information repositories even more diffuse," she adds.
