I recently attending my 4th ServiceMax event and once again this event did not disappoint. For those of you who are in the Salesforce world, but don’t know much about ServiceMax, it is a field service application and has clients like General Electric, Bayer and McKinley Elevator Corporation just to name a few.
My first introduction to the ServiceMax team was over two years ago, Director of Strategic Partnerships (at ServiceMax) -Jonathan Skelding and myself were given the responsibility to craft the Drawloop + ServiceMax partnership. Even now that I am gone, that partnership is still in place and growing everyday, its still rewarding to see.
Maximize16 in San Francisco was great, so many great app partners and customers. 
For me, the most compelling portion of the week was the keynote delivered by McKinley Elevator. ThingWorx, ServiceMax and McKinley Elevator worked together to deploy IOT into the field. They have sensors on elevators and lifts that constantly communicate with ServiceMax. That interaction between the “IOT device” and ServiceMax was awesomely powerful, so much so that it was the first time that I have seen a live demo, actually produce the intended results everyone dreams of.
I can clearly see IOT devices, auto creating work orders based on events, producing automated documents that report on the health of a machine and most importantly provide real time data to increase the probability of a “first time fix”. 
Last week I met with one of my clients, who has does not use ServiceMax, but uses Salesforce. They have decided to go all in on IOT. During year 1 ofa new customer it presently costs them more than $500.00 per physical site visit, customer.
Their projection is the cost of IOT for them will be about the same year 1, and year 2 they will see huge efficiency gains and cost reductions in the 40-67% range, and even more year 3. Those gains, plus the ability to sell more services are driving factors in their adoption of IOT.
If you are on theForce.com platform or a ServiceMax customer and you sell, install and or service equipment, you owe it to the long and short term success of your business to learn everything you can about IOT.
I plan on starting a blog series dedicated to IOT, and all of the automation it drives. Check back soon.
