Back when I joined Salesforce, one of the first things that struck me was the sheer ambition of our engineering organization. Fifteen thousand engineers shipping software across a portfolio of products that millions of businesses depend on.
To manage operations at this scale, our engineering leadership had built Engineering360: a comprehensive platform that pulled together data from dozens of siloed systems—code repositories, incident logs, deployment pipelines, productivity metrics—into a unified view. Ninety billion records, integrated in real time with Data Cloud, Tableau, and the rest of our stack. We had, at last, a single source of truth. And yet the questions that mattered most still took days to answer. We’ll return to how we solved that shortly…
First, let me use an analogy to explain the relevance and importance of Engineering360.
In 1935, the British Air Ministry asked its scientists for a “death ray” that could knock enemy planes out of the sky. Research scientist Robert Watson-Watt ran the numbers, told them the death ray was hopeless, and offered something better in its place: The same radio waves that couldn’t destroy an aircraft could reveal one, bouncing off its body and returning a faint echo that told you where it was and how fast it was moving. Within weeks his team detected a bomber eight miles off.Radar was born.
