Software giant Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced that it is expanding the scope of its workplace health monitoring applications to help in vaccine distribution programs.
The company launched the Work.com for Vaccines platform to help governments deploy vaccines developed for various diseases, including any of a number of highly anticipated Covid-19 vaccines under emergency development to contain the largest global health crisis in over a century.
The platform will also be useful for coordinating flu shots and other remedies, CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“We are in a situation right now, Jim, where vaccinations are one of the most important things we can do for public health,” the internet entrepreneur said in a “Mad Money” interview. “We have hundreds of new vaccines coming for Covid. It will be one of the biggest logistical and technology challenges really in the history of the planet.”
As part of the company’s Customer 360 platform, Salesforce said it designed Work.com for Vaccines applications to be capable of coordinating the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines to innoculate billions of people across the globe. The program will be useful for other endeavors too as it includes features to manage vaccine inventories, schedule appointments, monitor patient health status among other duties.
“Salesforce is building and delivering now our new Work.com for Vaccines, extending our super successful Work.com product, which has helped so many states, nation states [and] companies succeed during the pandemic,” Benioff said.
The announcement of Work.com for Vaccines comes months after the company launched the program to help companies bring workers back into the office as the country began to recover from a brutal lockdown that threw the economy into a recession. Stay-at-home orders were put in place across the country to contain a deadly virus that has now been connected to more than 200,000 U.S. this year alone.
Outside of wearing a mask and social distancing, public health officials say a vaccine is the most effective way to protect public health and help society return to some new normal.
Drugmakers like Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson are all rushing to develop a remedy in record time.
“I am done with Covid. I am so ready for this to be over so that we can get back to the life that we had, but none of that is going to happen until we all get vaccinated,” Benioff said.
