During CEO Marc Benioff's keynote speech last week, he talked about Salesforce's work with General Electric (GE) and said that he believed that the future of GE is 'around man-machine interface'. GE manufactures machines for a number of industries including aviation and energy.

"GE makes machines, they make CAT scanners, they make locomotives, aircraft engines etc. Those machines are becoming more and more intelligent and we want to have more information, more collaboration and more communication between those machines," said Benioff.

Benioff explained that GE had told him that it believes the future of its revenue and profitability is about becoming a great customer service company around the machines it produces. Salesforce pitched an idea to GE called 'GE-Share', which essentially allows engineers to communicate and collaborate with GE products.

"The key is that next generation aircraft engines, for example, have APIs and engineers will not only be able to work with those engines but be able to collaborate with them," he said.

"If they brought that information into a feed and had status updates, they could focus on specific posts from engines, they could bring in other GE engineers into that network and they could even bring in end-users into that network."