Salesforce Data Cloud is Salesforce’s newest cloud, a new focus on growing its ecosystem within the data space to help unify the customer data model. Now, what the hell does this mean? Well, it means that across the many different clouds that Salesforce has, it can build a holistic view of a customer. Now, why in the name of all things holy would a Marketing Cloud Developer / Possible Future Architect work on getting knowledge and working within this new system when exact target is totally a different thing and requires a whole different set of skills that are unrelated to Salesforce’s core? Glad you asked; now let’s break it down.

Marketing Cloud to Data Cloud?

So, if anyone has seen the news, Marketing Cloud is split right now; there is exact target, then Growth and Growth Enterprise? So many new names, but the important thing is that Salesforce is slowly building out Marketing Cloud into the core part of Salesforce. We have seen it firsthand starting at Dreamforce. Getting ahead can ensure adoption and more job opportunities and being prepared for what is coming next, especially when there is a new Marketing Cloud tool on the horizon called Next.

Automation Studio and Contact Builder are basically going to become Data Cloud. Journey Builder becomes Flows, and Email Studio becomes Email Builder. These tools are slowly going to be built  core, and eventually in my hypothesis, that exact target will become obsolete, but that won’t happen till maybe 5ish years from now when everyone is given an end-of-life deadline. I’m also not saying Salesforce has given an official end-of-life, but this is just me given my prediction, and I predict when the official announcement is made, there is going to be a dash to slowly move every piece of an Exact Target business unit into the new Salesforce Marketing Cloud Replacement. I believe businesses will need a few years to migrate over because this won’t be an overnight migration, but a slow and steady migration over a few years. A year to dive into what can be done and how to do it, then another year actually moving over.

But what about the missing features?

Glad you asked, and that’s actually my next step in my Salesforce career. I will be diving into becoming a Salesforce Developer and an App Builder. But why, you ask? Probably because we Marketing Cloud Developers will need to build apps for use with Data Cloud that will help refine the Marketing Cloud experience to fuel our own needs on this new platform. 

I fully expect the third-party companies to go ham on Data Cloud and to fix those features that we won’t miss within Marketing Cloud, such as journey builder mirages, failed email sends, duplicate key failures, and 403 timeout errors. There will be apps built from the ground up to help drive those features we like and to improve on the ones we don’t like and won’t miss. Also, maybe the interface will become fully unified and not change depending on the studio we are in.

In Closing

So as I write this, I am currently diving still into Data Cloud and diving even further  within the Salesforce ecosystem and not just being stuck into Marketing Cloud aka the middle child anymore. I have been relearning Java, Node, and code deployments. This is all part of the future to what I believe will become of every Salesforce Marketing Developer, and if I had to bet on it, I bet this is going to be what we will see within the next 5 years.The transition from Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developer to Salesforce Data Cloud Marketing Cloud Developer.

See you space cowboy…