He added: "They then have a whole social network around an aircraft engine. They could make their products more tightly integrated with their employees, with their partners and with their customers."

Computerworld UK also spoke to VP of platform research at Salesforce, Peter Coffee, who has also recently been appointed as CTO of automotive, who rebuked claims that the Salesforce platform couldn't cope with the amount of data machines would generate.

During Benioff's keynote Forrester analyst Stefan Reid tweeted: "Does Salesforce.com really have a #Bigdata Strategy to handle volumes of machine events??? The platform can't deliver today!"

Coffee said: "It's really important to understand the breadth of the Salesforce platform today. Five years ago we were talking exclusively about the multi-tenanted Force.com architecture. However, with the acquisition of Heroku, we now have more of a full spectrum of capability."

"If you take MILYONI for example, they air full length motion pictures, packaged as Facebook social community experiences, running entirely on that platform. So, yeah, we can deliver the cycles."