The ukuleles were again playing to the sound of the tune White Sandy Beach Of Hawaii. Very refreshing.

Just like the presentations of Steve Jobs, Mark Benioff used an infinite number of superlatives of the words “amazing” and “spectacular”.

He reminded us that this year’s Dreamforce was the largest conference in the industry of new technologies ever held. It also provided an opportunity to talk about the joint initiative of Salesforce & the Medical Center University of California (UCSF), with the construction of the Benioff USCF Children’s Hospital, a way to highlight the Salesforce Foundation and its donations.

As well as this, he gave a final reminder of the current transformation in IT – each decade requires a new IT platform. For Mark Benioff, for 2010-2020 this means Social, Mobile, Real Time and “Open”. With an underlying theme: The Cloud.

How does SFDC resemble this platform? Through its association with Database.com, Force.com and Heroku. Database.com allows, among other things, to store the social profiles of your customers through a unified data model. Data.com supplies the data to Database.com. And what legitimizes Database.com, are the the 36 billion transactions per trimester recorded in SFDC, which need to be analyzed. What kind of pricing was mentioned? $10 / Month / company for 150,000 transactions (if I understood correctly).

While we are talking numbers, here’s some data, this time concerning Appexchange, SFDC’s online marketplace. In 2011, Appexchange boasted: 1250 apps, 500 million dollars, 1 million installs.

I enjoyed the presence on the stage of French Loic Lemeur for his application, Seesmic, and that of Tim Campos (the CTO of Facebook) who uses Force.com for the majority of Facebook’s business applications (with an increasing rate of adoption for the migration of most of its apps to the Cloud) : at Facebook, CRM, repair ticketing, recruiting, etc. all use Force.com. Some very interesting “installed” or “on premise” applications at Facebook are: ERP, Tax, FP & A and BI …! On a positive note, they are continually migrating as they go along (Tim, if you read this, I may have something for you).

In short, SFDC is emerging as the Cloud and social platform that facilitates the creation of social networking products / employees / customers. The circle is completed by SFDC.

When Eric Schmidt of Google took the stage, he discussed the IT revolution, the criticism towards the inertia of big IT players, politics, education, the U.S. economy, and a certain stoicism (Schmidt supposes that over 20% of young Americans will not find a job). When asked by Benioff why shelves are not manufactured in the US in order to generate employment, he answered: “because I am sorry to say that U.S. labor is no longer the best, and the quality may be higher in other countries.”

Talking about his move to Google, Schmidt offered up one piece of advice: “Life is short, work with people you like.”.

On September 2, I went to the Question/Answer session (an open exchange between M.Benioff & P.Harris, the other co-founder of SFDC). The duo work really well together, the exchanges between them were lively and it was a real pleasure to watch! At the heart of the conversation: a lot of demands for new functionality, (localization of the tool, lots of questions on reporting and analytics in general). A bonus question that challenged me: What would you change in the world if you could? M.Benioff’s response: I would change the fatalism of E. Schmidt and I would give all possible employment to the young American workforce. SFDC is already made up of a 5000 people-strong team, and at the rate that they are growing, this could easily be possible!

So, Dreamforce ’11 has come to an end. It was personally and professionally, a true experience. I hope to see you at next year’s Dreamforce conference on September 18 2012, in San Francisco.

Bye Bye SaaSy, it was a pleasure to meet you

Here is the Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt Keynote at Dreamforce 2011 official video:

When Prince uses Bime to analyze the opportunity cost in banning the publishing of videos on Youtube… that will be the day

So, the Keynote: amazing and spectacular, obviously. Some more numbers for you (again, in no particular order):

• 45,000 people registered for Dreamforce (yesterday I told you 40,000… now I am rectifying that number, MB said it himself)
• 50,000 people present for the Keynote
• 35,000 watching online
• 1 queue, that snaked around the entire block of buildings
• 1 grand opening, complete with ukeleles and Hawaiian dancing, in order to “calm” and “invite” the Gods…(of business)
• 1 Salesforce “Born cloud & reborn social”
• 1 notion: our world is experiencing a post PC revolution
• Some reminders of the SFDC ecosystem: 300 partners, 475 breakout sessions, 104,000 customers, 12,000 charities that use SFDC for free

Now SFDC wants to be be a catalyst and evangelist of the Cloud and the social enterprise, by constantly adapting to change and obviously by leveraging the Cloud, which allows for fast deployment. The last year has been the social revolution in terms of online apps (business, personal etc.). The data from Facebook speaks for itself: 22% of our time spent online is now “social”, with an average of 4 hours a month spent on Facebook. Internet connections via apps are even starting to overtake direct connections to the Internet via a web browser (this is true for me personally, for example). Access to the web is completely transforming, and organizations need to evolve to keep up, by making sure their employees are increasingly connected.

But as Mark Benioff reminded us: It’s all about the database and how the tool allows you to track employee and customer information (tweets, blog posts, statuses, .. ) to create a true Social Company. This point is particularly relevant to us!

In brief: Employee Social Network + Customer Social Network = the Social Company
Add Bime to this equation and you get a Metrics-Driven Social Company (my anecdote, and obviously not in the Keynote!)

Among the main announcements from the VP of marketing were: maximum social functions in Chatter, (of which the most interesting was the fact you can mix data from different social networks in order to get a better overview of your customers (for public profiles only; only direct access to Dun & Bradstreet will allow you to get full access to entire client profiles)), the fact you are able to choose your data store (Data Residency Option), access to Database.com, the impending arrival of lots of HTML5, a user subscription model which can be scaled by volume (requested by Coca-Cola, and if I understood correctly), and quite simply: social, social, social! This last point was reinforced by testimonials from the CEO of Burberry, the CTOs from Coca-Cola, KLM, Verizon, etc.

Relevant quote of the day: “Facebook made me a better friend, Chatter made me a better employee .”
A last word: Every company needs to evolve and become SOCIAL !
A last word (again): the Metallica concert, the set from Will.I.Am, the video game rooms and the unlimited beer…needless to say, it was a great birthday.

Dreamforce related articles

1. Salesforce’s Benioff: “We Were Born Cloud, Now We’ve Been Reborn Social”
2. Salesforce.com tries to make cloud computing sexy at Dreamforce (photo gallery)
3. The Social Enterprise: What is it? Does it really matter?
4. Get the Most from Dreamforce for Your Sales Force
5. Interview with Parker Harris, Co-Founder and Executive VP of Technology
6. Dreamforce 2011 Underway in Post PC-Era
7. Analysis: Are We Ready to Become Friends With Things?
8. Accelerating your Business with the Cloud: A Dreamforce Conversation with Tim Campos from Facebook and Hane Vaillancourt from NetApp

How to follow Dreamforce 11 on Twitter

Tweeps to follow



9. @Dreamforce: For all the latest tips and announcements from this year’s event
10. @mikegerholdt (Mike Gerholdt): Certified Salesforce.com Advanced Administrator, cloud evangelist, blogger
11. @CRMFWI (Jeff Grosse): Blogger, CRM guy, Salesforce admin, fan of the cloud
12. @sfdc_nerd (Becka D): Salesforce.com enthusiast, member of the inaugural class of Salesforce MVPs
13. @themayorpete (Pete Dirksen): Salesforce technology enthusiast
14. @dschach (David Schach): Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant, Advanced Admin, and Developer
15. @andrew_sf (Andrew Hill): Salesforce employee since 2005

The Dreamforce Hashtag

16. The official Dreamforce Twitter Hashtag is #DF11
17. A longer version of the hashtag is also being used #Dreamforce11

    The Dreamforce 2011 App

18. This nifty app available from iTunes allows Dreamforce attendees to organize their sessions, schedule and contacts on the go, as well as providing imporatnt information and maps for the event. Most convenient is the ‘Chatter Feed’ to keep you updated with all the online buzz surrounding Dreamforce 2011.

As mentioned earlier, part of the team are attending Dreamforce 2011 so if you’re also attending or will be in the area, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

You can get in touch via ‘rachel at wearecloud dot com’

I have touched down in San Francisco for the Dreamforce ’11 event.

Here are some numbers, in no particular order:

• 40,000 people…who had the same idea as me
• 2 times as many people as last year
• 3 buildings (the Moscone center) dedicated to the event
• 1 entire neighborhood of San Francisco, taken over by Dreamforcers
• 500 meters is the distance from which you can see the Dreamforce signs, telling you that you’re heading in the right direction
• (At least) 5 DJ, mixing throughout the day
• 100m (at times, a lot more) of queuing to get a coffee or to get into the conference
• 3 Oracle teams with their branded balloons that were strategically squatted in front of the Moscone center, telling people that they are still the number 1 in CRM
• 100+ tonnes of food, catering to all tastes and beliefs
• 80,000+ mobile devices (probably more!)
• 1 WiFi network, which held up well despite the mass of people using it
• 100+++ smiles on the faces of Salesforce representatives (I don’t know how many of them there are, but they are everywhere) who are dedicated to the organization of the event
• 100+ events that are born out of DF’11 (for example, I went to MOMA, a DreamSimplicity networking event)
• 1 John, a Salesforce guy that dances ALL the time, especially to Blondie, in order to show me where my next session is
• 1 billion possible business deal combinations…

Well, I must admit, that this is where all the action is. Next year it’ll be us! However, no Platinum Partner package for us ($300,000). On this side of the Atlantic they are good at this stuff. Thumbs up from me!

The organization is particularly impressive. They have an answer for everything. I think they are overwhelmed by the number of participants though, as the biggest problem is having to wait in line to participate in sessions, even though you’ve paid your entry.

I’ll relay more of my findings/opportunities tomorrow. Well, I’ll try, as my schedule fills up pretty quickly, what with all the partnership opportunities I am spotting!

See you soon.

PS. The 31st (today) is my birthday. Theoretically, spending it away from home should be sad, but Metallica are playing tomorrow during the keynote opening a geeky thing which kind of makes up for it. Thumbs up once again!

Salesforce actually launched something similar 3 years back – a Facebook application for connecting data from the two services. Appropriately named Faceforce, the application allows you to see things like your contact record (which is kept in your Salesforce.com account) side-by-side with a user’s Facebook profile, assuming they are list as a friend.

What could this mean for Bime? Possibly an indirect connection to Facebook data, via Salesforce.com. Salesforce uses the Facebook API to collect data from the social networking site. Assuming it can be stored and accessed in Salesforce.com just as the rest of your CRM data, you may well be analyzing your Facebook data with Bime very soon!

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Astadia, a pure-play cloud computing integrator, and Salesforce.com have come together to announce the launch of the IT Cloud Transformation ROI Calculator, a free online service which will enable you to quickly estimate how much you stand to save in the cloud, versus on-premise. The program takes into account software applications, servers, data centers and back office functions and determines which would be cheaper with Web-based software applications and how long it would take to achieve ROI. The ITX (IT Cloud Transformation) ROI Calculator provides results in both US dollars and British pounds. The ROI generations will be made specifically considering moves to the Force.com platform as well every other major cloud platform including Amazon Web Services and Google.

For example, the ROI calculator shows that an IT environment for 250 users would run $883,000 for on-premise, while in the cloud it would cost $515,875, a massive savings of $367,125. That savings figure takes into account infrastructure migration costs; IT services costs; software licenses; project and platform costs; and IT development. At that rate, the calculator illustrates that the return on investment of the cloud project would be roughly 2 1/2 years. (Andrew Hickey, CRN.com)

"This new tool shows how much money IT departments could be leaving on the table," Cory Vander Jagt, VP, Astadia ITX, says. "Premise based IT solutions leak money at three different inflection points whenever a company gets bigger or smaller. Standardizing an application environment in the Cloud consistently provides elasticity at all three points."

You can access the ITX ROI Calculator here.