The Field Service Management Market Shift

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies

When Salesforce.com announced the release of its Field Service Lightning product earlier this year, it signaled that the field service software market is going through a substantial re-alignment.

Prior to the release of Field Service Lightning, Salesforce.com had relied on vendor partners to handle field service automation for its clients. Some of these partners integrated their solutions tightly with Salesforce, while some (like ServiceMax) actually built their solutions on the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce would like a chunk of what is estimated to be a $5.11 billion global market by 2020, one that has traditionally been dominated by best-of-breed and specialist solution providers. Salesforce.com has been drawn to the market in part because its CRM dominance puts it in a good position to offer an end-to-end customer service solution, but also because it has been facing increased competition from both Microsoft and Oracle. Oracle officially entered the field service space by way of its acquisition of TOA Technologies, while Microsoft joined the fray last year by buying FieldOne.

Traditional field service software vendors are now competing with software behemoths who could potentially dominate the market in a way that, say, SAP was never quite able to do. What this means for Salesforce.com’s service software partners is unclear right now. Salesforce has said that the there is plenty of business for everyone, but competitive friction seems inevitable.

Salesforce actually licensed portions of Lightning from another partner, ClickSoftware, and then built the new solution on top of Service Cloud. Having a fully integrated service module provides a more seamless flow of customer contacts within a single solution.

It also gives sales, service, and dispatchers a complete view of the customer record. That means everyone – regardless of role – has access to the same data, and potentially makes it easier to enable field technicians to take on sales roles, in situations and in industries where that is appropriate.

Lightning also plays a role in Salesforce.com’s partnership with Cisco Systems. Cisco’s Spark communications platform and WebEx online collaboration product will be natively integrated into the Sales and Service Cloud via the Lightning framework so that customers can communicate using chat, video conferencing and voice calls all within the Salesforce environment. The partnership also includes IoT collaboration via Salesforce IoT Cloud and Cisco’s Jasper platform.

We recently profiled an early Field Service Lightning customer, Miner Corp., which deployed Lightning as part of an effort to consolidate its field service management solutions. Miner originally contacted Salesforce to automate its customer contact operations. When they asked for recommendations on a best-in-class service platform in 2015, the vendor signed them up as an early adopter.

A second customer, home security specialist Safe Home (who will be profiled in our November issue), deployed Lightning because they were in a time crunch. They were already a Salesforce.com customer, so implementing Lightning was faster than trying to install a third-party solution.

These types of customers may also benefit from the announced Salesforce Einstein, an artificial intelligence (AI) solution. Using Service Cloud Einstein, companies could potentially resolve service cases faster using history and trend data. Connected devices could use IoT Cloud to trigger cases in Field Service Lightning to automatically dispatch technicians.

According to the company’s blog:

“Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein’s models will be automatically customized for every single customer, and it will learn, self-tune, and get smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data. Most importantly, Einstein’s intelligence will be embedded within the context of business, automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks.”

This convergence of AI, IoT, sales, and service solutions is an indicator of where the field service software market needs to go in order to help service companies innovate. Expect more partnerships, new market entrants, and more consolidation to come.