At Dreamforce 2019 in San Francisco, TechRepublic’s Bill Detwiler spoke with Jenny Sacks, senior director of customer and market insights at Salesforce, about the company’s IdeaExchange. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.

Bill Detwiler: When it comes to designing products, it’s always important for companies to put the customer at the center of that process. I’m excited to be here and talk to Salesforce’s Jenny Sacks. Tell me a little bit about your role in developing IdeaExchange–what IdeaExchange is–and then we’ll talk about what you’re doing with IdeaExchange in the future. 

Jenny Sacks: Customer Market Insights is really just a fancy way of saying voice of the customer. My entire job is to listen to our customers, to the market, to make sure that we are bringing all of that information into how we make decisions. The goal is to give a customer a seat at the table in every decision, big and small.

SEE: Data analytics: A guide for business leaders (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

One of the big ways that we listen is the Salesforce ID Exchange, which launched 12 years ago. The vision for it was pretty simple. We wanted a way for our customers to tell us what they wanted to see in the product. Anybody with a Salesforce login could come to the site, could say, ‘Here’s what I want to see,’ and the community would crowdsource votes. Over time, we got a sense of what was most important to our community by watching how voting changed, how ideas were logged. 

But–there’s always a but in these stories–we saw a massive amount of growth. Salesforce was smaller 12 years ago–we’re now big, thankfully–and we now had 65,000 ideas logged. We have hundreds of product managers; hundreds of thousands of customers have been added to our ecosystem. Over the years we’ve really struggled to scale that experience. The last year has really been, how do we reimagine the IdeaExchange to allow our community to have more of that dialogue about our roadmap and where we’re going, and to really see how they’re influencing and shaping Salesforce. 

Bill Detwiler: That’s something that’s a little bit of a criticism. Whenever any company–not just Salesforce–puts a program like this out there, people who are providing ideas–I don’t know whether they have realistic expectations about how long it will take before those ideas are implemented. How do you manage that with IdeaExchange? How do you set those expectations? Say, ‘We got all these great ideas, but there’s only so many people. We can’t get to things all of the time.’ How do you manage those expectations? 

Jenny Sacks: I don’t think we’ve always done a great job of setting expectations to be honest, and that was really evident last year when one of our oldest community members–his name is Steve Moelis–logged an idea on the IdeaExchange and essentially said, ‘I have some ideas for how you need to improve this thing. And it feels a little bit like a black hole. I’m not sure where my feedback is going. I’m not sure what you’re doing with it. I don’t know what the expectations are for engagement from the community and from Salesforce on these ideas.’

That idea picked up a lot of steam, got our co-CEO Marc Benioff’s attention, and he basically said, ‘What are we doing here?’ We had to have a long conversation with ourselves about do we want to continue to invest here? What does that look like, and how do we rebuild trust with our community? We had to start by saying hard truth: it’s broken, and we need to fix it. We want to reinvest. That’s really, really important to us, but we don’t necessarily know how to do that. 

Rather than coming up with our own expectations and setting them with the community, we decided to ask them for help in deciding what it should look like going forward. We went out on the road–we did 22 cities, four continents, nine countries–to talk to our community. We went out with some ideas for IdeaExchange, get very meta, and we said, ‘Here’s what we’re thinking about doing. What do you think?’ What we heard from our community was, ‘We want you to build the things that we want you to build.’

We started to look at the IdeaExchange and how it was set up, and logging ideas and voting doesn’t really tell us what’s most important to the community. We needed to build a mechanism that would allow them to put their product manager hat on and go through the trade offs and prioritize what was going to be built in the release. We decided to build an experience for them to do that. 

Bill Detwiler: What was some of that feedback that you got specifically? What were those ideas that people wanted you to incorporate into IdeaExchange? Like those mechanisms to help set those expectations, so that they can give you the feedback, they could understand where it’s going. Talk me through that process. 

Jenny Sacks: First, we had to sort of get over the frustration. We had to get through the, ‘You stopped listening,’ and that was really valuable to hear. I would rather a customer be mad at me than not talking to me at all, so it was really great for them to engage with us in that dialogue. Once we got past that, we realized that IdeaExchange wasn’t nearing our product planning process. Ideas are coming in, and people are logging comments and adding feedback, and the feedback pile is growing. We only do release planning three times a year, and when we make decisions for a release, that’s locked. We moved to the next one; that gets locked, and so on. We weren’t bringing our customers along on that journey with us. 

They were sort of saying, ‘We know that you do this thing, but we’re not really part of it.’ We needed to connect the dots more directly there. Now, what we’re doing is we open a two-week window every release cycle, just like our product managers do. We say to the community, here are the top 10 to 15 ideas from the IdeaExchange; you have a budget which represents the resources that our engineers have, and you get to allocate your budget to what you’re most excited about. Whatever wins that cycle–we call it the prioritization cycle–we will build in our product.

We gave them that direct line from your feedback through to what we deliver. We’ve been piloting it for the last four releases. We just did it manually before we had the product to support it, and it’s been great; it’s great exercise. We tested it; we figured out what worked and didn’t work and were able to fine tune it. The product we’re launching–the new IdeaExchange we’re launching tomorrow–is reflective of all that feedback. It’s kind of not a splashy surprise release. It’s a, ‘here’s the thing we built together, ready for you to now take out and continue to provide us feedback.’

Bill Detwiler: Was that a difficult process internally? You talk about sometimes it’s difficult to take that negative feedback and do something constructive with it. Talk a little bit about that, so that people who are doing that in their own companies maybe can learn from what Salesforce went through during that process. 

Jenny Sacks: A big piece of advice I would give is don’t be afraid of the bad feedback. As I said, I would rather a customer yell and be mad–because at least they’re engaged in the dialogue–than to not have them talk to us at all. If they’re talking to somebody else about their problems, then there’s no opportunity for us to fix it. What we did was really try to channel their energy, their frustration, into helping us make the solution. 

Internally, it was a tough couple of months where we felt like, first we let our customers down, and that’s a yucky feeling. We have a long road to go, but ultimately–for me–it’s been my favorite year at Salesforce. I’ve been at the company for nine years, and it’s been awesome to turn the ship from sort of a negative to a positive and to really see our community be part of that and feel like it’s theirs. I would say to anybody who’s going through a similar situation: embrace the negative feedback, embrace the frustration, and work through it with your customers because then they have a more vested interest in being part of the solution and helping you celebrate the new wins. 

Bill Detwiler: During the pilot program, what type of feedback have you gotten from people that are using the new IdeaExchange as opposed to the old one? What’s been their reaction? 

Jenny Sacks: We took it out on the road, and I think at first we had to just educate people about our product planning process. We realized there wasn’t an education gap. 

Bill Detwiler: And were they surprised?

Jenny Sacks: They were surprised. I think they thought we were just going to fix the voting that they’re used to, the site that they were used to. When we came out and said, ‘We actually need something new.’ They went, ‘Oh, okay.’ Once we played it out, and we tested it with them, I think they really started to see how it made it more of a direct connection from their voice to Salesforce. We essentially dedicate part of our roadmap to what they want, really–no exceptions. That was incredible to watch them. We did see them go through some iterations for a while. We had a price next to every idea, and so you had to pay the price.

We found customers were saying, ‘Well I wouldn’t leave any money on the table, so I would buy things I didn’t even want just to spend all my money.’ That’s going to lead us down a road of building things you’re not that excited about, so we had to iterate the model based on how they engaged with it. We joked that we became experts in game theory, trying to figure out how to stay a step ahead of our customers in terms of the ways that they could play with the model, or make it work in a way that wouldn’t allow the true voice of the community to come through. The entire goal is to elevate their voice as a community within how we plan Salesforce product.

Bill Detwiler: Talk a little bit about customer centric design–when it comes to product services, UI, whatever it is–how important that has been to developing IdeaExchange, this entire process of how Salesforce builds products just in general and how people doing the same thing in other companies–whether it’s in tech or whether it’s in consumer products, or whatever it is–how important that customer centric process is part of the design?

Jenny Sacks: It’s amazing to see ideas that come in and then the product that comes out of it. In a lot of ways, we think of the community around a specific idea as a mini advisory board because sometimes we log an idea, and a product manager will go, ‘Okay, you’re asking for a faster horse. How do I give you a car?’ It allows for really great dialogue, but our customers have a seat at that table to say, ‘Here’s how I would use this in practice. Here’s how I would use it in the real world to serve my users.’ That’s become really invaluable to our product managers to feel like they have that input of, ‘Here’s how I would take this thing you’ve dreamed up in a lab and apply it to my users.’ It allows for changes and modifications.

Often, we will introduce IdeaExchange ideas into the product as a beta, and we’ll say, ‘Play with it; beat it up,’ and they’ll come back and say, ‘I like this. I like that. This didn’t quite work for me.’ We’ll have some time to fine tune it before it becomes generally available across our product. It’s been great to really see them playing that active role. It’s really part of our DNA. The IdeaExchange is one of the ways we listen. Every year at the beginning of our fiscal year in January, I take Brett Taylor, our Chief Product Officer, and all of his leadership on the road for something we call product roadmap tour, where we’re essentially taking his yearly plan for products to our customers and saying, ‘Prioritize it; rank it; take something off; add something that isn’t there.’

We do a series of visionary counsels throughout the year where we are bringing our customers–about 20 of them–into a room, and we’re saying, ‘Let’s imagine the future together.’ We don’t show any slides; we don’t talk about Salesforce. We just say, ‘What’s the future of the workforce? What’s the future of app development?’ It allows us to build the future together. We’re always trying to listen in really big and small ways but make sure our customers stamp every piece of the journey so that when it arrives for them, they go, ‘Yeah, I see myself in this product. It’s built for me.’

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The years 2010-2019 produced some significant advances in hardware relied upon by enterprises. 

Below are the top 10 hardware developments that have impacted the past decade. 

1. Tablets

While often regarded as a consumer device, the arrival of tablets provided great advantages to the enterprise. Whether it was the Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle Fire, Microsoft Surface Pro, or some other handheld device, businesses began using them to streamline operations. 

Business usage examples include CRM activities, inventory tracking, information gathering, rapid access to data or communications, conducting financial transactions, and more.

It’s worth noting that consumer usage of these devices helps businesses today by increasing the playing field for content delivery. For example, lovers of e-books and streaming audio/video increased revenue for organizations like Amazon, Netflix, and Youtube by purchasing services to use on their tablets.

SEE: Cheat sheet: Microsoft Surface Pro X (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

2. Mobile payment devices

Mobile credit card readers from companies such as Square, Shopify, Payanywhere, Intuit, and other providers (who also coordinate the actual transaction processing) have revolutionized the payments industry. 

The ability for companies or self-employed individuals to take payments from customers on mobile devices not only makes it easier to attract more business, but it increases profits. Whether it is your local hairdresser, neighborhood Scout troop, or nonprofit seeking a contribution, chances are mobile payment devices are in use all around you. 

SEE: Mobile device security policy (TechRepublic Premium)

3. Smartwatches

Smartwatches generally tie into mobile devices, which of course are not new to the past decade, but the latest devices facilitate better integration, app usage, and functionality. 

Smartwatches have many business applications, such as facilitating communication via text, phone or email, taking notes, managing to-do lists, receiving calendar or trip itinerary notifications, and even translating text. Some smartwatches, such as the Apple Watch Series 5, include a collection of apps focused on user fitness, biometrics, and health research. 

SEE: Apple Watch Series 5: A cheat sheet (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

4. Amazon Echo

Like tablets, the Amazon Echo (better known as Alexa) offers many potential business uses even though it is generally considered a consumer device. 

The Amazon Echo isn’t restricted to native capabilities. There are plenty of extra functions, known as skills, that can be added to her repertoire of talents such as spell check/dictionary, translation, time tracking, and more. 

Business functions offered through Alexa are diverse and compelling. A few sample actions to help with worker efficiency include using voice assistant, research, and calculations, translations, coordinating meetings, finding service providers, and tracking travel details, expenses or tasks. You can also use Alexa to order items through Amazon such as office supplies, equipment, and the like.

SEE: Cheat sheet: Alexa skills (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

5. Self-driving cars

Despite being decades away from adoption, few technologies have been more anticipated heading into the next decade than autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars, more specifically, haven’t made huge inroads into the enterprise realm yet but stand poised to greatly transform the transportation field. TechRepublic’s Macy Bayern covered three companies (Waymo, GM Cruise and Argo AI) which stand poised to become leaders in the autonomous vehicle movement.

Business uses and use cases for autonomous vehicles are plentiful. Human chauffeurs, taxi/ride services, truck drivers, may no longer be needed, saving company’s labor costs. Machines can be less error-prone than human drivers, which might cause less accidents. Businesses will not have to worry about lawsuits caused by driver negligence or intoxication, and traffic/speeding tickets levied upon human drivers company vehicles will become a thing of the past.

Yes, machines can break, but as Bayern quoted in the above-referenced article, Mo ElShenawy, vice president of engineering at GM Cruise, feels the benefits will outweigh the disadvantages:

“At the societal level, self-driving cars have the potential to save millions of lives, reshape our cities, reduce emissions, give back billions of hours of time and restore freedom of movement. At the individual level, we believe self-driving cars will deliver safer, more convenient, more affordable, and more accessible transportation.”

SEE: Special feature: Autonomous vehicles and the enterprise (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Note: The next 5 products were invented before 2010 but gained significant momentum and acceptance over the past decade.

6. Augmented/virtual reality devices

Once thought of as merely a novelty or gaming-related concept, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) devices provide enterprise benefits, which have been realized in recent years.

Retail industries can leverage AR/VR technology to allow customers to interact with their products, thereby increasing potential sales. AR/VR can help with design and planning to simulate the intended finished results. Real estate companies can show virtual tours of properties. AR/VR can assist with education, training and even assist with surgical measures. It’s also possible to work with data and in manufacturing/construction endeavors using AR/VR devices.

SEE: Special feature: Executive’s guide to the business value of VR and AR (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

7. Automated checkout/ordering devices

The progression of automated checkout/ordering devices in enterprises has made a significant impact over the years. I’m referring to self-checkout registers in stores and tabletop devices in restaurants and bars, which permit customers to order more food or beverages, settle their tabs, or summon waitstaff. (Transaction and retail solutions provider ECRS provides some good examples of these devices). 

While there is something to be said for human interaction, many consumers just want to facilitate their transactions or interactions with businesses by using this new technology and this is unlikely to change in the future. 

SEE: More Decade in Review coverage (TechRepublic on Flipboard)

8. Drones

When Amazon first announced plans to use drones to deliver packages the concept seemed impossibly futuristic and unwieldy. However, last June it was reported that Amazon Prime’s Air drone will begin delivering packages “within months.” And the business uses for drones doesn’t stop there. The FAA awarded UPS a certificate to use drones on medical campuses across the country. In Australia, data captured from the drones are trying to save the Great Barrier Reef.

Other common business uses for drones involves aerial exploration, photography, and security surveillance.

SEE: Decade in tech: What stood out or fell flat in the 2010s (ZDNet)

9. Robotics

According to the IFR’s World Robotics Report global robot sales are expected to experience a 12% growth from 2020 to 2022. It’s easy to see why, since robotics has advanced so much over the past ten years that robots can engage in manufacturing and assembly operations, medical procedures, physical security and more. 

Robots can also be controlled by humans and sent into dangerous or unpredictable areas, or even places humans simply can’t go due to environmental hazards.

Further, more than half (64%) of employees said they trust a robot more than their manager, with half turning to a robot instead of a supervisor for advice, an Oracle and Future Workplace report found. 

SEE: Decade in Review 2010 – 2019 (CNET)

10. 3D printers

Adoption of 3D printing is increasing across different industries, with annual growth estimated at 23.5% over the next five years, reported TechRepublic’s James Sanders. 

3D printers have become smaller, more portable, faster, and more affordable. Further, printing capabilities such as printing with metal or concrete, creating vaccines, prosthetics or human organs, printing large objects such as furniture or bridges, and the ability to create artwork or other consumer goods have pushed this technology into the enterprise. In some cases these capabilities already existed but were relatively unknown, cumbersome, or overly expensive.

The uses for 3-D printing seem limitless. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan reported on Casca, a startup out of Vancouver, which is looking to meld 3D printing and additive manufacturing, retail, and footwear to bring mass personalization to insoles and shoes. While, formlabs, a 3D printing company, is launching a new business unit, 3D printer and materials aimed at the dental market.

The field is still very much growing with new developments anticipated including increases in printing speeds, printed homes or food, and advantages in space travel–no need to bring a tools or parts if you can just print the ones you need.

SEE: 3D printer turns out organs that act like the real thing (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

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Amazon unveiled Braket, a quantum computing support that signifies a mainly perfunctory entry in the quantum computing industry.—Itit provides choice, surely, as Amazon delivers cloud entry to D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti quantum computers—but practically extracting any benefit from any of these stays the job of the consumer.

To start, D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti depict 3 diverse approaches towards quantum computing: D-Wave provides a quantum annealer, IonQ employs trapped-ion qubits, and Rigetti is advancing a superconducting qubit co-processor. D-Wave’s quantum annealer is a recurrent concentrate on of criticism in the business for currently being significantly less sturdy than other approaches—their supplying depends on all complications staying expressed as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) trouble. Reasonably, this is skim milk as opposed to the comprehensive-fat styles of other personal computers.

SEE: Quantum computing: An insider’s manual (free of charge PDF) (TechRepublic)

While D-Wave contends that QUBO has small business value—and there are businesses employing it—few situation seem in which a D-Wave annealer performs nicely in head-to-head comparisons with anything else, for the realistic explanation that programmers primarily want to publish specifically for D-Wave.

As an aside, D-Wave also garners criticism for characterizing their quantum annealer as made up of up to 2,000 qubits. Amazon’s announcement blog site article, released Monday, indicates that “as I produce this, the greatest quantum computers have about 50 qubits.” 

IonQ has the difference of getting partnerships with AWS, and with Azure Quantum, announced at Ignite 2019 in Orlando final thirty day period. This most likely bodes very well for IonQ in conditions of availability to builders at a minimum, taking into consideration the size and industry situation of AWS and Azure. Also, Rigetti’s partnership is possible to assistance in mindshare. When there is no ensure that the hosted platform product will win out for quantum—particularly keeping in intellect discrepancies between components developers—that delivery design has worked out for basically every little thing else up to this issue.

Together with the unveiling of Bracket, the corporation is rolling out a Quantum Alternatives Lab, that the organization touts as letting corporations “to faucet into our have abilities and that of our consulting partners. Our objective is to operate with you to discover people realistic takes advantage of, and to enable you to establish up your personal ‘bench’ of capable quantum builders.”

In the same way, the AWS Centre for Quantum Computing, setting up at Caltech, aims to “deliver alongside one another scientists and engineers from Amazon with major tutorial establishments in quantum computing, to create more potent quantum computing hardware and determine novel quantum purposes with the objective of boosting innovation in science and business.”

Update (December 4, 2019): 
A previous variation of this post indicated that D-Wave units have up to 5,000 qubits. D-Wave’s currently commercialized procedure – the 2000Q – has 2,000 qubits. The referenced 5,000 qubit system is slated for availability in 2020.

Even more, a D-Wave spokesperson explained to TechRepublic that “a universal quantum method is on our roadmap.” On programming, D-Wave contends that “for any program, you need to formulate the problem in a way that the QPU understands. D-Wave, between others, has resources to make this simpler by handling large- and low-stage abstractions.”

After the publication of this posting, the Amazon website write-up language was altered to state “the major gated-dependent quantum personal computers contain about 50 qubits.”

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Biometrics are meant to supply a more secure and a lot easier way of safeguarding sensitive information. Using your fingerprint, your face, or your voice to indication into an account or retrieve personalized facts is considered a far better and safer option than trying to juggle an array of passwords. Biometry-based authentication is being used to accessibility authorities and professional workplaces, industrial automation units, company computers, private laptops, and cellular telephones.

But what about the computer systems that gather, process, and retail store biometric data? Are they protected, and if not, how do you far better protect individuals techniques? A analyze produced Wednesday by Kaspersky describes how malware has influenced servers and workstations with biometric details and features advice on how to safeguard people pcs.

SEE: Specific report: A profitable technique for cybersecurity (free PDF) (TechRepublic) 

Wanting at the first nine months of 2019, Kaspersky ICS CERT industry experts investigated cybertheats which qualified personal computers utilized to gather, method, and retailer biometric facts. Particularly, the computers analyzed ended up types that ran Kaspersky protection products so the enterprise could fully look at them.

Just for the 3rd quarter, some 37% of the pcs bundled in the analyze were being strike by at the very least one malware infection, all of which were being blocked by Kaspersky software program. Specially, 5.4% of the threats detected and blocked ended up fashionable remote-obtain Trojans, 5.1% were malware applied in phishing assaults, 1.9% ended up ransomware, and 1.5% were being Trojan bankers (Figure A).

Figure A

The internet popped up as the best resource for the malware assaults, accounting for 14.4% of the infections analyzed and blocked by Kaspersky. These sorts of attacks incorporated threats observed on destructive and phishing websites as very well as net-based mostly e mail providers.

Next, detachable media was the perpetrator in 8% of the attacks identified, most often utilised to distribute worms. Soon after hitting a computer, worms can obtain spy ware, remote entry Trojans, and ransomware.

Electronic mail threats rated third, accounting for 6.1% of the attacks in this situation. In most instances, these were being the normal phishing email messages with phony messages about the shipping of items and services or the payment of invoices. The messages contained one-way links to destructive web-sites or hooked up Microsoft Office paperwork with malicious code.

“Our investigate reveals that the current situation with biometric facts protection is critical and needs to be introduced to the consideration of business and government regulators, the group of information security professionals, and the normal community,” Kirill Kruglov, senior security specialist at Kaspersky ICS CERT, reported in a press launch. “Even though we believe our buyers are cautious, we will need to emphasize that an infection induced by the malware we detected and prevented could have negatively affected the integrity and confidentiality of biometric processing programs. This is specifically the scenario for databases the place biometric details is stored, if these devices had been not protected.”

To assist organizations superior protected the pcs that tackle biometric knowledge, Kaspersky delivers the subsequent recommendations:

1) Minimize the exposure of biometric systems to the online and internet-linked threats. Ideally, these types of devices should really be section of an air-gapped infrastructure, which signifies no link (wired or wi-fi) to the world-wide-web and no connection to any other units that connect to the internet. Cybersecurity really should be of the maximum priority when new methods like this are built and implemented.

2) Guarantee that the optimum-amount of cybersecurity requirements are used to the biometric methods. This recommendation contains the next steps:

• Thoroughly teach the operating personnel on how to resist potential cyberattacks.
• Make sure that all important cybersecurity controls are in area.
• Enlist a devoted group of remarkably-skilled protection professionals to keep keep track of of infrastructure security.
• Often perform safety audits to determine and reduce probable vulnerabilities.
• Guarantee that latest strategic and tactical danger intelligence is frequently provided to the cybersecurity crew.

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