I thought the engineering behind some of that stuff was pretty cool too. Unfortunately, a system that prides itself on handling millions of records a second AND has no version control AND is sold as "no technical skills needed" is just too scary for me to recommend to anyone.
Hey! Glad you enjoyed what the IOT team was doing! I didn't think many people knew about us!
I was actually a part of that team and left Salesforce pretty recently. I think i can safely state that everyone involved in building the tech for that IOT product was pretty proud of what we built.
That being said, the team that built it 2-3 years back and the current team are fundamentally different. The department was thoroughly axed back around November 2017, and multiple teams, including my old one, were spun out into different other projects. It's a shame really, that project was what lured me into joining a behemoth like Salesforce in the first place.
Wow we probably crossed paths. At the time, a CTA buddy of mine was starting the North America IOT Cloud practice at Accenture and was bringing me along for the ride. He had a baby and eventually left to run a program at a client (9 to 5 no travel). Without him, I bailed soon after for a higher up role at a startup. I would still love to get back in that scene though, this acquisition makes it that much more interesting.
On the other hand, the IOT team at SF probably loves this. I got to spend a few days with the main engineers discussing their "Thunder" architecture a couple years ago. Under the covers it's awesome (great integration of multiple open source technologies) and the "IOT Cloud" UI isn't bad either but they didn't have an answer for data visualization on the scale they built for.
on a tangent, while getting into SF's IOT product they were talking about how it was so easy business analyst could set it up (famous last words right?). It's pretty easy to make a mistake and create a billion SF cases ( case is like a trouble-ticket in SF's Service product) in the span of "click -> "oops let me undo that" -> click" hah