Take Aways from Dreamforce '10

Author // Brent Mellow

Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com took the stage with the kick-off keynote address to more than 30,000 people at Dreamforce 2010 (up from about 19,000 in 2009). He noted that salesforce.com is the first SaaS company to exceed $1.7Bn in revenue and was ranked as the 4th fastest growing company in 2010 by Fortune Magazine. Salesforce.com now boasts 87,200 customers. Below are some of the hot features and topics that were discussed including some new product announcements (Chatter Free, Chatter.com and Database.com). If you have questions about any of these features, the availability of the features or deploying them in your organization, contact akaCRM.

Service Cloud 2 (Alex Dayon, EVP CRM Applications), Kraig Swerland

13K customers use the service cloud, both B2B and B2C
Active Alive (new acquisition) - webchat product available as part of Service Cloud
Smarter analytics (by using sales & service cloud together; understand what is at risk)
Showed screen pop for in-coming call with TAPI integration
Instant Messaging for Agent to Customer communication: Included with Service Cloud 2
Showed Service Level features of Service Cloud 2

Sales Cloud 2 (Brett Queener, EVP-Products)

With Winter '11: chatter, jigsaw (doubling down)
60K customers have turned chatter on; 20% increase in productivity because of breaking down silos
profiles, feeds, groups, status update - better way to stay on top of everything
Jigsaw is Major new addition; 23Million contacts updated everyday
Over 100 new features in Sales Cloud 2
Reviewed Winter '11 features including Chatter Profiles, ability to follow documents, data, customers, opportunities, etc. Chatter is now part of every single data records; so people working on a record have a private space to collaborate.
Showed Chatter Mobile on iPad for mobile collaboration.
Showed Chatter Mobile on iPhone with GPS chip, including a captured whiteboard picture.
New drag and drop dashboard and report engines

Database.com (new products) - 6th cloud and new major product, EVP Technology, Steve Fisher

Open to any language, platform and device
First cloud database which is open
Trusted by 87,000 companies (database under salesforce.com)
It is an enterprise database, relational, full text search, user management, row-level security, triggers and stored procedures, built-in sharing a security model, designed to talk to other systems (API) which updates as you design your data model. 10Bn transaction last year. Cloud database - no hardware or software; and trustworthy (supports highest security standards available)
Open database, multi-tennant cloud database
Available next year
$10/month per 100K record; $10/month for 150K transaction per month; first 100K records are free
www.database.com

Chatter Free (new product)

New product will bring in finance, hr, services, engineering, facilities....
Price is Free
Was released this weekend. Clients just have to turn it on.
Exiting users can start sending out invites to co-workers for within chatter networks.
Can also just turn-on all employees and provisions (setup | manage users | add/edit). 2 new profiles: Chatter Free User and Chatter Moderator
Upgrade to $15/month to get access to Accounts/Contacts, objects
Chatter.com (Feb 2011) - new free collaboration service, mobile and viral
New Chatter Desktop (new product) - see desktop integration settings (free); runs on Adobe Air

Guest Presenters

Enrique Salem, President & CEO, Symantec - noticing productivity go way up because email box not being clogged because of Chatter; shortening on-boarding time by weeks; creating competitive advantage by using social media.
John Miles, VP Dell - most successful Chatter client ever -
Sonya Sullivan, Motorola - using in Call Center and rest of company - 40K partners using and 2,000 in sales cloud.

Other Metrics

40,000 people in the room at the keynote
100,000 customers run on 1,500 Dell PCs with over 1/2 billion transactiions per day
1.7Bn in revenues - first SaaS company to achieve this
Ranked by Fortune as the 4th fastest growing company in 2010
CO2 per transaction - 1.35grams if on-premise; 0.09 on SFDC because of model
Be aware of the false cloud... solutions that require hardware to scale.
announced ISV Force
Chatter is most successful product ever at SFDC with large users (e.g., Dell 100K users, Deloitte, 6K users)
Chatter 2010 - 2 awards: Product of Year (eWeek and Read/Write Web)

Dreamforce 2010, DAY 2
Marc Benioff began the Dreamforce 2010 Day 2 keynote address by sharing information about the University of California San Francisco. Marc and his wife donated $100 million this year to build the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Mission Bay. Marc introduced Sue Desmond-Hellman, Cancellor of UCSF to share information about the power of the collaboration that will be possible on the new campus.

Scheduled to open by 2014

1 million square feet of labs

Dedicated to bringing together innovation, technology, science and clinicians

The 7^th Cloud: Introducing Heroku

Marc and others have been working on a solution to open the platform and extend it. They found an answer in Heroku.

Marc, along with Heroku’s CEO Byron Sebastian, announced salesforce.com’s intent to purchase Heroku ($212 million), a development company with a focus on Ruby. Marc said that through SFDC and Heroku, Ruby developers will have a path to the enterprise due to the agility, scalability, productivity and mobility. Ruby is designed by developers for developers and will allow cloud developers to build apps faster and quicker and easier than ever before in a trusted and reliable environment.

Heroku was founded in 2007 to give productivity to developers

Open Source

Currently 105,950 Heroku apps including Groupon, Hulu, Twitter

Over 200 million web requests a day

3,000 new apps are developed every week.

The 8^th Cloud: RemedyForce

Marc introduced Bob Beauchamp, CEO of BMC Software and RemedyForce, a strategic partnership between salesforce.com and BMC to bring service management to the cloud.

IT Configuration Management Database

Asset Management

Inventory Management

Incident Management

Force.com 2 Platform Strategy (salesforce.com EVP Platform & Corporate Development: George Hu)

Appforce11: Upcoming new features include:

New criteria based sharing model (2.0)

Bulk PAI Query/retrieve

Configurable Visualforce pages

Reduced Apex Governor Limits 70%

+ 50 more features

Siteforce: Empowers the business person to make the simple website change

Built in content management

Reusable components (e.g., social media components)

Allows Sites to run 24x7 (20,000 sites are powered by force.com)

Drag & Drop functionality

Device aware to show the exact right size image for a device.

VMforce: enterprise Java apps; 6 million in the world. VM force

Leverages existing java expertise.

Now in private beta. Beta Customer #1 is Accenture (guest speaker, CTO, Paul Daugherty)

GA next year

Heroku: see details above

ISVforce: instants provides the multi-tenant magic of force.com

Closing Guest Speakers

Marc returned to the stage for a Celebration of Success inviting the following customers to share about their apps and their Dreamforce experience.

Michael Chansen – CEO Blackboard: technologies for education on online training; gives managers/sales people the training that they need. Benefiting from the force.com platform.

Deanna Johnston – CIO at Belkin:Use a Pricing and Rebates application to share information on over 2,000 SKUs.

Joe Drouin, CIO– Kelly Services: supplier portal app

Peter Winters, CIO, Avon: Productivity for Sales Leaders; Product Management App; Sales leaders can operate and communicate with up to the minute information. 150,000 users

Mark, Deloitte: Recruiting app; innovation app; trade promotion app