t this point, you may be wondering how you can join this technological tsunami that seems to be razing in so many aspects. The truth is that there are numerous training courses and resources available, and via the learning platform Trailhead and by having a good dose of perseverance and interest in learning can give you the know-how you need to develop your career. There are also personalized paths that can help you achieve the coveted certifications for the platform, aligned with different career specialties including administrators, consultants, marketers, architects and developers.
If you have a technological profile and are interested in diving into this technology, you must first understand what the role of Salesforce is within Industry 4.0.
A little context before you start training
The digital era, known as the third industrial revolution, is characterized by interconnected devices and the disappearance of analog systems. Indeed, there is talk of a new revolution—Industry 4.0, or the fourth industrial revolution—during which we will witness the integration of digital, physical and biological systems. To enable this integration between both areas, industry 4.0 relies on two main pillars:
Physical realm: represented by areas like IoT, robotics, biotechnology and 3D printing.
Digital realm: exploiting mass information from the physical world, such as Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing.
For example, Salesforce—perhaps not as well-known on the street as Google or Apple—is a company that offers a series of business cloud solutions characterized by having a sharply-defined and constant innovation cycle, as well as incorporating multiple innovations in its different products.
Functional areas: an extensive catalog of preconfigured modules
Salesforce provides pre-built environments that are focused on enterprises’ multiple business needs. To cover this area—for example—they offer a CRM to manage customer relationships in sales and post-sales cycles. It also provides communication channels to ease interaction with customers, as well as e-commerce modules to enable online sales. The analytics module is also of great interest, which helps teams understand and log consumer habits and trends. Rounding out the functional section are implementations of specific Salesforce products focused on industries such as banking, insurance, healthcare and manufacturing.
Platform areas: customer-centric custom solutions
The platform areas provide great support for companies’ ICT divisions, in so far as they let functional solutions be expanded and other totally-new ones be implemented to cover any specific needs.
To do so, the interconnection of heterogeneous systems is enabled, providing two different platforms (high control and high productivity). Further, all Salesforce solutions are implemented with a decidedly open character, following market standards, and with a significant emphasis on security issues, which are so critical in all cloud solutions. A good example of this is the large list of official security certifications its products hold.
The melding of all these features make Salesforce products a suitable platform to assist companies that are moving toward Industry 4.0 and, because of this companies including Vodafone, Toyota and Spotify have implemented it. This is why important market analysts, like Gartner, believe that Salesforce products are leaders in multiple domains, including Enterprise Integration PaaS, Enterprise High-productivity PaaS , Digital Experience Platforms and a long etcetera.
With these facts on the tables, being certified on Salesforce is a path that definitely opens doors in the job market. Specializations range from the most functional terrains like sales, customer service, marketing and e-commerce, to other much more technology-based ones for those who want to master the tool in fields such as development, architecture, data analytics or systems integration. We will keep providing you with further information about all of them, as well as resources, in upcoming posts, so that you can work toward certification with confidence.