The news about Salesforce`s entry on the NFT market has spread around since the beginning of February. It is a topic that has been discussed at a sales meeting inside the company, as its new strategic direction: the NFT Cloud.
Since the NFTs have caused a lot of debate among industry`s professionals, with issues springing from usability to des-centralization limitations, it seems a good moment for Salesforce to go headfirst on the market. But how will that complete Salesforce`s ecosystem and will most companies be able to use it on at-least medium scale?
NFT`s (or non-fungible tokens) are digital assets (anything digital, from drawing, music to algorithms, etc). that are unique and non-interchangeable. They are part of the blockchain technology (Ethereum crypto) and can grant access to content. Obviously, they can be traded as any other crypto. So far, they have been mostly used in art (as part of fine art collections and being even auctioned at Christie`s).
While they have been considered an interesting, but limited phenomenon, their evolution towards Utility NFT`s is the move that supposedly made SalesForce take on that direction. Instead of simply linking out to a JPEG stored on a cloud server, these unique tokes provide utility by granting a buyer access to different products, subscriptions or experiences.
Salesforce`s intentions are to offer both the Cloud Service for the producers to be able to create/develop/store their NFT`s and the Platform (similar to Open Sea) for selling/trading/integrating with the rest of its services. How is that going to fit in the market? The answer seems to be a new way of integration for creating/accessing/using digital.
While the details of the positioning/strategy/direction adopted by SalesForce are still hazy, the companies can keep their eyes on 2 aspects: SAAS products of all shapes and sizes will rapidly gain value for the consumer, since their subscriptions can be traded from peer to peer. Using SalesForce could grant companies access to new integration models and deployment of services, different from what is now on the market.
On the other hand, think boosting sales, launching new products or raising awareness on complex subjects by using digital assets to unlock diverse benefits on a global platform. All this, while being kept updated on the newest SaaS and deploying innovative services literally moments after hitting the market.
Time Magazine and Pepsi have already taken steps into similar directions. Last spring, Time released TIMEPieces, a collection of NFTs giving owners access to magazine content and events. Mic Drop collection, Pepsi`s NFT collection released last December, is also a good example of a first dive-move. Is this what SalesForce has in store for its partners?
As a certified partner, we will be part of this challenge and will bring you updates as soon as they are ready to reach you.