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Salesforce.com adds Jawbone, Oculus Rift, smart devices to wearables platform

Salesforce.com has added a plethora of new devices to its growing wearables cloud platform, including the Jawbone fitness tracker and Epson's smart glasses.
Written by Charlie Osborne, Contributing Writer

Salesforce is betting on wearables proving popular in the workplace, and has expanded the Salesforce Wear cloud platform to cater for a new range of wearable devices used in the enterprise.

The company launched the Salesforce Wear platform earlier this year. While the industry is still young, Salesforce sees wearables as the "next mobile revolution," and is keen to stay ahead of the game by providing a platform for developers to create enterprise-related applications which use wearable devices as endpoints. 

Announced on Thursday, the cloud services company revealed that the platform is now compatible with an extended list of wearable devices. While already compatible with wearables running the Android Wear operating system -- including Google Glass, ARM, Fitbit, Myo from Thalmic and Pebble -- Salesforce now runs additional support for:

  • Epson Moverio: Smart glasses
  • Jawbone UP: Fitness tracker
  • Meta Glasses: 3D smart glasses
  • Oculus Rift: Virtual reality headset
  • Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses: Android based wearable computing, communications and display system

Brent Blum, lead of wearable technology practice at Accenture commented:

"Accenture believes that wearable technologies have exciting use cases not only for consumers, in areas such as fitness and health monitoring and wearable fashion, but also powerful applications within the enterprise, enabling maintenance workers to quickly identify parts in the field, or allowing surgeons to connect with experts to get guidance on complicated procedures.

Through our experience working with leading clients on cutting edge consumer and enterprise deployments, we've seen first-hand the potential wearables have to transform the way people live and work. Like salesforce.com, we see a very promising future for wearable technologies and are pleased to be working together to deliver solutions in this area."

The Salesforce Wear app ecosystem has been expanding quickly of late, with a growing number of developers working on enterprise-based apps for the wearable industry. Some examples include:

  • Alpine Metrics: A free app, Intelligent Forecasting, gives salespeople instant access to important trends on their wearable devices to better understand what's happening within a business and prioritize deals in real time.
  • Brivo Labs: Brivo Labs' identity access management application, NthID, uses a person's cardiac rhythm -- a unique individual identifier -- to allow for secure and easy access to both laptops and physical spaces.
  • ClickSoftware: The ShiftExpert app from ClickSoftware works with devices including the Samsung Gear II to enable employees to complete tasks such as clocking in and out, which are then automatically added to timesheets.

Research firm Gartner predicts that wearable devices will drive 50 percent of all total mobile applications by 2017.

Read on: In the enterprise

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