What a great time we live in.  I always love the energy of this time of year as excitement builds around the buzz of Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference.  This year will be my 7th time attending the event and each year is bigger and better than the one before.  This year I can’t find enough superlatives to describe my excitement around the Monday Cloudstock event preceding the actual conference (http://www.cloudstockevent.com/).

If you have not heard of Cloudstock, it is time that you did; it has the potential to be a truly revolutionizing event.  Salesforce.com has partnered with about 20 other cloud computing vendors, big and small, for a one day cloud-technology extravaganza.  Event participants will include the likes of Google, Amazon, PayPal, Yahoo, Salesforce.com (of course), Adobe, Ebay, LinkedIn, and many more.  The goal of the day is simple…bring together the best minds in cloud computing for a day of networking, collaboration, and inspiring fun.  Participants will be able to choose to participate in presentations being given by a who’s who in this space on topics ranging from telephony, service integration, ecommerce, cloud architecture, virtualization, and much more.  Feel free to check out the list yourself (http://www.cloudstockevent.com/sessions).  Best of all, event registration is FREE!

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Great…sounds like a tradeshow.”  Wrong.  What Salesforce has done with this event is truly foreshadowing the next phase in the maturity of the industry.  Cloud service providers to date have been in strong competition to establish superiority in their respective markets.  We have seen applications evolve into platforms, social networking sites evolve into marketing behemoths, and a spree of mergers and acquisitions in this space.  The next frontier is going to be the bundling of technologies to create powerful synergies and truly transformational enterprise solutions.  So why is this event exciting?  Because it is not every day that one gets to be a part of exploring new spaces and pioneering new ground (or more appropriately new clouds).

I am so excited about Cloudstock that I am taking a dozen of our best technical minds at Model Metrics to participate.  Our goal will be to learn, contribute, socialize and savor the moment of history in the making.  I hope to see you there!

If you don’t follow salesforce.com closely, it’s probably because you’re not currently a user. That will probably change pretty soon. Investors in old technologies are getting worried, with Kaufman Brothers issuing a "Sell" rating on Accenture for that very reason. Cloud computing and SaaS (salesforce.com especially) are taking a significant bite out of the old giants.

On June 22 out in San Jose, salesforce.com is hosting a huge event called Cloudforce (which we’re sponsoring), where they will be unveiling the next nail in old-technology’s coffin: Salesforce Chatter. So why mention the investment worry over the old world of technology players?

Simple: the old guys just don’t get it.

There is an enormous revolution going on, and pretty much every person is taking part in it. Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. The social connections between individuals have exploded, and mobile access to these systems lets us plug in to those connections anywhere.

With Chatter, salesforce.com is now making the enterprise social. Everything you know and love about social media is now coming to your company, but only if you’re a salesforce.com user. Nobody else is doing this, and investors are paying attention and putting their money where their mouth is.

Salesforce has been on an absolute rocket ride, and that is showing no signs of changing any time soon. Maybe it’s about time you join the social revolution too.