Salesforce today announced it plans to roll out a blockchain network that organizations will be able to invoke from within the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) application platform.
Announced at the company’s TrailheadX 2019 conference, Salesforce says organizations will not only be able to create a blockchain network using Salesforce development tools, but also view all the nodes that make up that network as objects within Salesforce applications.
The instance of blockchain that Salesforce plans to generally make available next year is based on a Hyperledger and Hyperledger Sawtooth, an open source blockchain platform and associated set of distributed ledgers being developed under the auspices of The Linux Foundation.
Salesforce CTO Parker Harris told conference attendees that Salesforce is leveraging its software-as-a-service (SaaS) application to both launch blockchain networks and monitor events such as transactions as they occur across that network.
“We’re bringing the ease of use of Salesforce to managing a blockchain network,” says Harris.
Harris notes that Salesforce already has more than six million developers that are using various classes of tools to create and customize Salesforce applications. Salesforce earlier this week also moved to further expand that base by making Salesforce Lightning Web Components, its JavaScript framework for building Salesforce applications, available as open source code.
If Salesforce has its way, blockchain networks will simply be a transparent extension of a suite of digital business applications that all share a common object model. Rather than every IT environment having to master blockchain technologies on their own, Salesforce is essentially turning blockchain into an extension of its application services.
Obviously, Salesforce is not the only IT vendor that sees an opportunity to deliver blockchain as a service. The one edge that Salesforce has is the large number of organizations that are already relying on its software to track transactions that blockchain networks would make immutable in a way that would be simple for those organizations to embrace.
