Hoping to get in on the ground floor of the emerging BYOx (Bring Your Own Anything) market, Salesforce is launching the Wear platform, a dedicated initiative for wearable computing in the enterprise.

Despite shaky consumer interest in this emerging sector, wearable tech remains an active area of interest for gadgets like Pebble the fitness wristband, and Google Glass, the augmented reality eyeglasses. Here to bridge the gap between the latest gadgets and business applications is Salesforce, combating consumer uncertainty with proof points demonstrating wearable tech’s value in the workplace.

Developing appeal

Essential to the Salesforce Wear program is the Developer Pack for Salesforce1, appealing to app makers ready to create business-centric services for wearable technology. The Pack will be open sourced, featuring reference applications and code, along with documentation, demonstrations and tech support. Salesforce is tapping into its reported 1.5 million developers to kick start this initiative, raising awareness and building out the use cases that could attract executives and end users to the wearable enterprise.

Salesforce’s vast developer ecosystem is one of two major factors the company considered when preparing Wear for launch, along with delivering enterprise capabilities at scale. “With Wear, we give businesses more options where they don’t have to worry about the ‘plumbing’,” says Daniel Debow, Salesforce senior vice president.

Convincing developers and executives the benefits of Wear is a significant order of business for Salesforce, even with wearable technology’s sci-fi-like appeal.  For developers, Salesforce plans to promote Wear at upcoming events, particularly this year’s Dreamforce. Hackathons, contests and on-site training round out the marketing track for Wear’s immediate future.

Building business

For enterprise bosses, however, use cases must come with actionable data and foreseeable returns. Given the young nature of the wearable tech market, Salesforce recognizes it’s dealing with new concepts. Wear’s team looked to existing cloud and mobile data to anticipate growth opportunities for wearable tech, anxious to get ahead of the curve to provide clients a competitive advantage when it comes to customer engagement and internal workflows.

“When we look at the wearable tech market, we recognize it’s very early,” Debow explains. “This ecosystem is growing really fast, five times faster than smartphones did when they first hit the market. The time to hit the wearable tech market is now, to provide  competitive advantages for businesses.”

In the case of wearable tech, a business’ competitive advantage is data-driven. Wristbands bands, augmented reality glasses, smart watches and the like all give off environmental data that’s often lacking from other mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets and laptops. A wrist band may, for instance, provide body movement data that could be useful for labor-intensive jobs such as retail warehousing. A field technician could leverage connected eyeglasses to call off site support, streaming video data to show an equipment problem in real time.

A demonstration of Salesforce Wear showed a scene in which a businessman is running late for a meeting. His smartwatch displays pertinent information on meeting attendees, and noticing he’s not yet present at the meeting, gives the option of sending a pre-written email that reads “I’m running late.”

The smartwatch already seems to be a favorite wearable device for Salesforce and its users, as Debow noted several occasions in which he’d seen a customer hack together a way to push Salesforce notifications to the wrist-worn timepiece. Nor is this Salesforce’s first interaction with smartwatches. A recent update to Salesforce1 Mobile enabled notification delivery to Samsung wearables, one of many points of integration expected by Salesforce as the Wear platform expands.

Remaining considerations

Salesforce’s efforts in wearable tech boil down to business intelligence (BI), though it doesn’t offer analytics solutions as part of the Wear platform. That’s left to the business itself, which can execute its own analytics solutions using Salesforce’s built-in reports and dashboards. That still leaves quite a bit of work for a business to do on their own if they hope to fully achieve the competitive advantage through enterprise-ready wearables, given Salesforce’s stated goal of minimizing the amount of “plumbing” a business would have to do on their own.

Those curious about the storage and safety of wearable device data should know that all data captured as part of the reference apps is “stored securely in the…enterprise cloud platform Salesforce1,” confirms Debow. See details on Salesforce1 security compliance here, and here for mobile-specific details.

End user controls will also be an important consideration for mainstream adoption of wearables at work, as some employees may view work-related wearable tech as opportunity for bosses to keep closer tabs on their whereabouts and daily interactions. This is another item for the business to consider, though Salesforce could prove useful as a conduit for distributing apps that could extend more controls and settings options for end users.