It has been a few months since Dreamforce and the announcement of Genie, Salesforce’s answer to demand for real-time customer 360. It’s reported that Genie will be released in pieces over the next 12 months. With a native Snowflake integration and real-time queries, it might look like a very similar solution to Omnata and Salesforce Connect. However, from what we know so far, Genie looks like a higher level strategic solution that would deliver an ambitious CDP vision for large enterprises.

Let’s dive in.

What is Genie?

As reported by other Salesforce blogs, Genie’s foundation is actually an existing product, Salesforce CDP. Genie looks to deliver a bunch of improvements and add-ons to make it more real-time and natively integrated with the rest of the ecosystem.

Genie will have native connectors to Mulesoft, Tableau, and Flows, plus external systems like Ad platforms. Genie appears to be less of a single ‘product’ and more a bundle of improved existing offerings that will solve customer 360 use cases. Connecting to ‘any app’, for example, looks like it will actually be handled by Mulesoft, and similarly, Automation is a real-time connection into the existing Flows module.

Those familiar with Salesforce know that native integrations between products like Marketing Cloud, Einstein, and the core CRM are more challenging than advertised. Most customers stitch these systems together themselves with tools like Mulesoft, Workato or other SaaS integration tools. This reliance on data replication between separate data stores creates latency so the move to real-time will be a big improvement.

Use cases

The demos show the platform reacting to customer interactions with personalised communications and messaging in real-time. Judging by the reference customers, F1, Ford and L’Oreal, the solution is aimed at the top-end of the market with large scale B2C messaging requirements.

The Genie persona graph is the central feature that enables this. This is where customer data from different sources is unified to create a single view of a customer. This is what Salesforce CDP can do today (same as all CDPs), however, in its current form, it’s a separate platform that has its own data-store and data-model. Genie’s messaging claims itself as the single source of truth, however, it also connects to other platforms that would make the same argument. It’ll be interesting to see where the true single source actually ends up in customer deployments.

Genie and Snowflake

Part of the announcement was a focus on Snowflake as a native integration. What’s more, Genie is said to be utilising Snowflake data sharing, both ways, to query the customer’s data in place, instead of traditional data replication.

This potentially a big validation of Snowflake's data sharing concept.

Data-sharing has been growing in adoption as an integration from SaaS vendors like Stripe and Hubspot. The fact that data-shares are said to facilitate data integration both ways is a step beyond what data-share enabled vendors are offering today, which is a one-way serving from the app to the customer's Snowflake account.

However, what’s a little confusing is how Genie’s customer data graph will work with Snowflake architecturally. Data warehouses have captured a chunk of the CDP market as people have found the greater flexibility and scale of a data warehouse outweighs the benefits of the more real-time event style behaviour of purpose built CDPs.

Mature Snowflake customers would already have all sources flowing to it and unified customer data ready for consumption. And what becomes the primary source of truth? In these cases, it’s unclear what the Genie data unification layer would be used for other than mapping data to the specific object models of the Salesforce end-points. If so, it just acts like an integration mapping layer.

With the full release expected in 2023, it’ll be interesting to see how it actually works under the hood and how customers deploy it.

So, how does Genie compare with Omnata?

While the Genie concept looks great overall, the actual delivered product looks like it will be an amalgamation of many different products to deliver end-to-end solutions for big enterprises.

In comparison, the Omnata Salesforce App is a lightweight integration layer that’s designed for customers looking operationalise data warehouse datasets in the core CRM. Customers who have adopted a modern data warehouse technology and practices can plug Omnata in without the heavy lifting data unification that Genie offers.

Omnata is the fastest and simplest way to get Salesforce connected to data in your Snowflake, BigQuery or Rockset data warehouse.

That said, we see the Genie moves as a strong validation of what Omnata has been building on for the last two years:

• Data warehouses continue to become a single central datastore.

• Customers who have adopted modern data practices can give up on traditional point-to-point integration and model output datasets for any integration use case.

• Data replication should be minimised. Omnata uses live-queries with Salesforce Connect to virtualize data without replication or OData.

• Fresher is better. As data warehouses achieve lower latency they’ll continue to unlock more operational use cases like customer messaging.

Omnata and Salesforce Connect deliver use cases like:

• Record-level integration of customer data for improve service workflows

• Integrating operational datasets like product metrics, product user data, error logs.

• Archiving large historical Salesforce instance data in Snowflake and querying back

Omnata has no infrastructure outside of Salesforce and customers deploy integration use cases in minutes that normally take weeks. Book a call with us to see how fast and easy it is to get started.