Salesforce Reveals Blockchain Solution

Salesforce conference keynotes always make me laugh, cry and most importantly leaves me inspired to learn more about their new solutions and last week’s TrailheaDX conference in San Francisco did not disappoint. TrailheaDX is touted as the Salesforce conference for developers so it was no big surprise that a large portion of the keynote was spent on announcing and demonstrating their new Blockchain solution. During the keynote, they spent quite some time at first explaining what exactly Blockchain was for the novices in the audience and watching online. They explained that it is data that is secure, transparent and traceable thanks to the encrypted hashes that never change. Leah McGowen-Hare, Senior Director of Trailhead Evangelism, gave us a memorable explanation of immutable data as she explained that blocks cannot be changed once built just like you cannot “take a chicken nugget and turn it back into a chicken.” So why would Salesforce be entering into a realm who’s most noteworthy use case is for Bitcurrency? At its core blockchain is all about authenticating and sharing data across multiple third parties. It’s not as odd as it sounds at first; after all the Salesforce Platform is the #1 CRM and is full of mission-critical data. The new blockchain solution allows for easy use of the Salesforce data and flows. Plus since it is built on their Lightning platform building and maintaining blockchain apps can be done declaratively. It’s an odd-thing to tout at a developer conference but one they kept reminding us about. To illustrate the ease of declaratively building Salesforce blockchain Salesforce had a live demo of their new blockchain solution during the keynote. In it, they showed a real-life use case of transferring college credit across colleges. Then they demo’d how that blockchain data can be used in Salesforce processes such as notifications and updating other Salesforce data. Other use cases for Salesforce blockchain include document transfers between buyers, sellers, lenders, government, agents and appraisers when buying selling houses or filing claim documents between car owner’s, insurance companies, body shop, and adjusters. I can think of many more use cases. Just think of the time-savings for companies if they can quickly build blockchains to connect and share data. Reference Links: TrailheaDX https://www.salesforce.com/trailheadx/ Intro SF blockchain: https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/2019/05/introducing-salesforce-blockchain.html