As it does every year, Salesforce raises the ante for industry technology trade shows, surpassing its own record for attendance, vibe and mojo. I’ve been attending Dreamforce since the early 2000’s and watched as both Salesforce and its showcase Dreamforce event have evolved.
Last year, Dreamforce 12 demonstrated that the Salesforce Platform had truly “arrived” in the enterprise with the likes of GE and Coca-Cola showcasing their success. This year’s Dreamforce13 amplified these themes with comprehensive presentations of how to cultivate, nurture, enhance and monetize customer experiences with presentations from Philips, ADP and Sony.
In particular, the notable announcements from this year’s Dreamforce13 include Salesforce1, ExactTarget Marketing Cloud and SuperPods.
Salesforce1 – An umbrella marketing term used to describe a series of technologies including new APIs as well as extensive technology frameworks for transforming the administrative and custom object desktop Salesforce UI into a “Mobile First” paradigm. These frameworks are meant to accelerate application development both within the enterprise as well as for commercial purposes through Salesforce1 AppExchange Accelerate while retaining a meaningful role for legacy VisualForce.
In addition, Heroku1 was unveiled providing a flexible alternative to “native” development on force.com.
Analysis – Salesforce1 technology is promising, and the attention toward updating a 10 year old user experience for mobile form factors was needed. Missing from much of the discussion was the importance of Design considerations when re-imagining applications for the mobile platform. This was a missed opportunity for Salesforce to highlight partners with Agency-centric skills that are User-experience driven vs. those partners that excel in technology.
ExactTarget Marketing Cloud – Scott Dorsey’s presentation showcased an impressive array of proactive multi-channel marketing capabilities covering email, SMS and others. Dorsey’s presentation was impressive and the capabilities of the platform are comprehensive.
Analysis – Marketing Cloud is the only Salesforce brand to be shared with a legacy acquisition and I was very surprised when I first saw this branding unveiled at the Atlanta Customer Company Tour this fall. Word is that Scott Dorsey has been given the clout and independence to make the Marketing Cloud a success. No coincidence that an orange glow pervaded the Moscone Center keynote in stark contrast to Salesforce Blue. A big opportunity for Scott will be winning over Salesforce’s traditional core B2B customers.
Super Pods – At the very end of the main keynote came a major announcement of a new joint offering by Salesforce and HP: The Super Pod, a dedicated instance of Salesforce for very large customers.
Analysis – For me, this was the biggest shocker of DF13. Rumors were swirling about multi-instance vs. multi-tenant since this summer’s reconciliation and monster deal between Salesforce and Oracle. Now comes this alliance with HP to provide a single instance dedicated pod to Salesforce’s “largest and most important customers”. A lot of folks are having an issue with Salesforce walking back over a decade of the multi-tenant mantra, but clearly Salesforce is facing certain realities in the Enterprise head-on with this offering, among them data residency and perceived security. I believe this is a huge game-changer that will allow Salesforce to compete directly with hosted “Cloud” alternatives such as Amazon EC2 and emerging offerings from IBM and others while defending itself against competitor inroads in existing large customer base.
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