On Monday, Salesforce is set to announce its next-generation CRM platform called Salesforce1, which is envisaged as providing a way for software vendors, developers and customers to integrate third-party services like as Dropbox and Evernote with applications and sensors.

Salesforce1 is a ‘mobile-first’ environment that underlines Salesforce’s determination to be one of the first platform providers that can successfully connect the enterprise to the billions of devices and sensors that make up the “Internet of Things”. It’s an ambitious, future-proofed platform designed to ease the transition for companies as they embrace mobile apps and services for sales and marketing.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff plans to outline the platform during a keynote at Dreamforce on Tuesday, but in a nutshell the new software should make it easier for businesses to customize Salesforce.com’s services for smartphones and tablets. In addition, application developers will also get better tools to tap into the platform.

Here’s a slide that illustrates the Salesforce 1 stack:

The company said that all of its existing customers will be running on the new Salesforce1 platform, and that they’ll have the option of buying parts of that stack, or the entire bundle.

Probably the most exciting item on the agenda is Salesforce1’s series of APIs. With these, Salesforce1 is effectively Salesforce’s big push for the Internet of Things – hugely important given that there will be more than 50 billion connected things in the world by 2020, according to Cisco, by which time sensors will be tracking everything.

Salesforce’s position is that there’s a customer behind every one of these ‘things’, and this presents a million different use cases. For example, factory floor machinery sensors could be able to spot and flag problems, before sending an alert to the Salesforce service cloud.

“The workflow will be integrated into Salesforce. The key here is that the use cases will be totally different,” said Al Falcione, head of corporate messaging at Salesforce. “Salesforce 1 is the way of connecting things in a flexible way to transform sales, service and marketing.”

In his keynote, Benioff will outline other key points about Salesforce1, including:

• Ten times more APIs and services
• Existing Salesforce apps can run within Salesforce1
• A new Salesforce1 Admin App for administrators
• iOS and Android mobile apps that aggregate all of the company’s tools, including
• custom-made applications built by enterprises.

Salesforce1: Ahead of its time?

Salesforce1 underscores the fact that the Internet of Things is all about the end users, but there’s a gaping hole that needs to be plugged – Big Data analytics:

“A big hole is really the analytics,” said Ray Wang, principal of Constellation Research, in an interview with TechCrunch. “There’s a big data opportunity and big data business model opportunity here to enhance customer experiences, benchmark and broker data, and to build new business models around big data and analytics.”

For now, Salesforce1 is probably a couple of years premature with its Internet of Things/customers theme, yet the platform has enormous potential as it’ll be able to provide experiences and outcomes derived from these customer connections to the Internet of Things. But the Internet of Things is still in a fledgling state, and these connections will take time to form. Salesforce is right in its belief that there’s a customer behind everything, but it could be some time before the infrastructure and analytics is in place to allow companies to properly leverage it.