At the @Dreamforce keynote speech, CEO Marc Benioff kicked off, promising “the biggest and most exciting announcement” in company history to a packed house of more than 19,000 attendees. Had “anyone who came into the country for this conference” stand: 60+ countries.
Marc: “Our job is to evangelize cloud computing.” A huge shift happened, the fundamental operating systems are moving to the cloud. Force.com, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Twitter all building operating systems in the cloud; no longer on your desktop.
“You reported capabilities 5x faster and 1/2 the cost Microsoft.net or Sun Java,” he said. You’ve created a #1.3B annual run rate revenue company, more than 67,900 paying customers.
Dreamforce was a big, expensive show. They painted the stairs!
The Salesforce.com Foundation dedicates 1% of time, equity, and product. Means 165,000+ hours of community service, 7,500+ non-profit organizations, $18+ million in grants. Marc did a great job pumping up customers as CRM and cloud computing being bigger than all of us. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco’s Mayor took the stage and a demonstration about how non-profits use the technology.
Marc discussed “The Real-Time Cloud” ~ ISO 27001 certified security, “5 9’s of reliability,” scalable with 100,000+ users on an account. A few months ago they introduced “5-minute upgrade,” they have three global data centers. If one has a catastrophe, another would take its place within minutes. Since they are running two data centers in parallel, when they are upgrading, they can point to the other center. The maximum time you might be without service is five minutes. Believes he’s the only company in the industry that does this.
In Cloud 2, Twitter mentions are logged into Salesforce.com. Facebook comments can be uploaded into the company’s knowledge base and the link can be served to the customer.
Sales Cloud 2 includes apps that perform functions akin to: ebay (real-time price delivery), Evite equivalent (schedule a sales meeting), Sales Genius = basaed on your problem what content has helped close a similar transaction. Mobile content for smartphones. With Salesforce to Salesforce, 30% of users have access to shared content. Real-time conversations have “taken over,” now you’ll have the ability to use for marketing and sales.
Salesforce for Outlook 2 is totally redesigned – you won’t have to associate with the correct record; they will do it for you. Salesforce content can find the best content as easily as a video on YouTube.
Salesforce Genius: You can search the library and create your own slide deck. Removes the need for sharing content on shared folders, email, and the like.
The Cloud Scheduler: making scheduling meetings as easy as using Evite. You can send a picture of which of these dates would work for you, after you check your and other team members’ calendars right on Salesforce. We can track response in the app.
The New Quote button. Will grab info from the opportunity. Can generate a PDF on your letterhead and send to the file. When content is integrated into the sales cloud, you deliver content as a link/website.
You can see when your prospect opened the email. (Perhaps what they viewed and how long they viewed it?)
George Hu, EVP of Marketing and Alliances, unveiled a new user interface.
Mr. Benioff introduced “what’s next,” the next cloud. 1960’s = mainframe. 1980’s = client/server. Today = Enterprise cloud computing. “It’s hard to think there’s something as big as cloud computing.” The new today = Social Computing.
1980’s workgroup computing (Lotus Notes + Novell GroupWise)
2000’s intranet computing (SharePoint, Groove, File Sharing)
Today social computing (Facebook, Twitter, Cisco Webex, IBM LotusLive, Citrix)
Btw FB and Twitter, a half-billion users. “Why is there not a Facebook for the Enterprise?” I know more about strangers on FB than I know about my employees are working on. I know when my friends are seeing the movies, but I don’t know when my VP of Sales sees our biggest customer. I know when I’ve been tagged in a photo but not when a key document is altered. “Why is there not a Twitter?”
See my next post regarding Salesforce Chatter.
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