Now that I have a few days of distance from Dreamforce, and more importantly some sleep, I wanted to re-cap my thoughts on the conference I just attended along with 30,000 of my closest friends. First off I’m amazed at how much larger Dreamforce gets every year. This was my 6th one and I’ve had the privilege of speaking at the last five so I’ve seen it grow from being a smaller show at Moscone West, to taking over Moscone North and South, and now this year taking up all three venues. I think the big announcement back in ’05 was something around “Multi-force” and having multiple applications by switching the drop-down on the top right of the screen (which just essentially changed what tabs were available). This year we got to see VMForce go into private beta and become a reality, hear about the launch of database.com and the intent to acquire Heroku.
To me these announcements show that Salesforce.com is serious about the platform and making force.com a true competitor to other cloud platforms that are available today. The ability to support multiple languages (Apex, Visualforce, Ruby, Java, or anything and use database.com) shows a real commitment to the custom development community. Past Dreamforce’s have felt more CRM focused with some excitement around Force.com, but this one seemed more like the ship is truly changing directions and that the company is changing it’s focus and truly trying to broaden it’s reach. The training wheels have been removed from Force.com and now it can be used by developers of almost any background.
As with any marketing driven company we will have to wait a bit to see how this all comes together, what limits or governors exits, and the timing of these new options. I think one of the bigger announcements was a quiet one, that they will be reducing some governor limits by 70%. As with any PaaS platform you have to take the good with the bad. You have this huge platform to use and it takes away all of the low-level details and tweaks from you (which can be good), but since it is a shared environment you also have to be a good citizen and abide by the rules of sharing and governors (which can be challenging). The fact that these limits are raising will make developing on the platform even easier and will allow for richer applications.
More options, more languages, lower governors, I like where this is going.
Dreamforce 2010 will be remembered as the year of the platform. As usual, it was an incredible show with all sorts of great product announcements, entertainment, vendors, and innovative customers. Most impressive were the platform announcements that provide us a glimpse into the direction that we are headed over the next year.
As with any announcement, salesforce.com is sure to include a Safe Harbor announcement to emphasize the point that these features, modules and capabilities are not currently part of the product. That fact alone makes it all the more exciting for us to speculate on the potential and meaning of each!
70% Reduction in Governor Limits. This is music to the ears of developers all throughout the force.com ecosystem. It is nearly impossible to talk about APEX development without some discussion on how to cope with, work around, or otherwise avoid some of the governor limits that exist. In many cases, the noise generated around governor limits has more to do with inefficient or poorly written code than it does a real problem, but there is room for improvement here. So far I have not seen any documentation that will provide further evidence on the limits actually being addressed, but we can remain hopeful that the 70% includes the ability to manage larger data volumes without timeouts.
Database.com (www.database.com). Perhaps the most talked about new module is Database.com that represents a true cloud-based database priced at just $10/user/month. This service will allow custom development on the force.com platform with authentication (oAuth), SOAP & REST based APIs, auto scaling, elasticity, and security. It is presumed that connectivity to Database.com will be made through the standard force.com API, so there is still going to be some variance between standard database capabilities and that of those offered through this service (e.g. outer join queries, custom indexing, etc), but it will make a splash in the market by competing directly with cloud based infrastructure vendors.
REST API. The new REST API is in developer beta currently, and should be generally available in either Spring or Summer 2011. This new API allows for simpler, faster development with much less overhead than the SOAP version. The capabilities of REST are currently only a subset of the SOAP version, but it easily covers the most commonly used features. The REST API also support JSON formatted messages. The predominance of mobile solutions will surely make development using REST a staple in force.com development shops.
SiteBuilder. Force.com sites development is going to get a lot easier with a slick IDE that is integrated directly into your force.com instance. This tool has a WYSIWYG designer, the ability to drag and drop files from your file system, and site previews. Currently, it appears that this feature is mostly demo-ware, but in 6 more months it is going to be great.
Heroku (Ruby on Rails). Salesforce.com formally announced its intent to purchase Heroku to allow for native support of Ruby on Rails within the force.com environment. Marc Benioff did a great job introducing Heroku to the Salesforce.com family, but it is a bit early to understand the nuances of how they will play in the ecosystem.
All of these announcements (not to mention VMForce) make 2011 a year to anticipate from a technology standpoint. You can trust that Model Metrics will be here to lead the way!
Dreamforce this year was similar to past shows: exciting, a source of breaking news, and unbridled energy. But the scale of this year's show really set it apart from the past. As we understand it, there were nearly 28,000 attendees, an increase of nearly 50% on the year before. To say Salesforce is on a roll would be quite the understatement.
This year Dreamforce focused heavily on what it calls Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2, representing the transition all of us are making from desktop or laptop computing to mobile computing. Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris made special note of this during the keynote, giving us a shout-out in the process for our dedication to mobile development:
Dreamforce this year also saw 2 other major announcements regarding database.com and Chatter.
Chatter of course launched earlier to much fanfare as the first enterprise social network. Promising to improve collaboration and reduce email traffic, Chatter was already a success. The announcement at Dreamforce that Chatter is now free to all Salesforce customers will only serve to make the service more sticky.
Database.com represents the next logical step for salesforce.com as a true infrastructure-as-a-service offering, bringing a cloud-based database to the masses. Since it is salesforce.com's database, it is already one of the largest enterprise databases with more than 20 billion records and an astounding 25 billion transactions per quarter.
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!
We just closed down our booths at Dreamforce and are all heading back to our respective cities. Based on credible sources Dreamforce attendance was just a few people shy of the expected 10,000. That is a very interesting number considering some of the economic news as of late and companies that have travel bans, spending freezes, etc… This really speaks to the power of SaaS (software-as-a-service) and PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and the value companies see in the cloud even in tough economic times.
This Dreamforce was very different than in years past for more reasons than just the growth in attendance. The entire first day’s keynote was purely around the platform and force.com enhancements. Depending on what tracks you attended you almost wouldn’t remember that salesforce.com has a CRM product. With the advances in APEX, Visualforce and now Sites they have put together a very viable platform that can be used in a wide variety of situations.
We have received a lot of great feedback for our new products that we unveiled at Dreamforce, or shortly before so. Everyone loves the idea of Search2GO (demo) and searching for data within salesforce.com from their iPhone for any edition of salesforce.com (other than Group edition). It was exciting to talk to someone from Japan by our mobile booth who is a big fan of Expense2GO and has been using it since it launched with the AppStore back in July. It really proves the international support of the iPhone and force.com when you see users from all over the world storing data in their local language and currency.
We were fortunate to have early access to force.com Sites as well as the Amazon toolkits and the timing worked out perfectly as we could use them as the foundation for our new Lasso2GO product suite. We are very impressed with what you can do by leveraging best-of-breed services from force.com and Amazon Web Services to build cloud platforms that were not possible before these platforms existed. It was exciting to see Charlie Bell (VP of Infrastructure for Amazon.com) on stage with Marc Benioff and Adam Gross and have them showing off our upcoming CardLasso application. I’m looking forward to applying this same technology stack to our customer base as we help them build new applications we haven’t even imagined.
It’s just two days away. No, not Dreamforce, although that’s definitely important to me and to Model Metrics. What’s two days away is the Presidential election.
Last month I commented on the first big drop in the financial markets. Since then it’s been a bit of a stock market roller coaster and the Presidential campaigns have both turned to how they are going to fix it. Whoever wins, I don’t expect the nominee to follow his current prescription precisely. Right now it’s still a campaign and rhetoric will overrule reality.
When reality does hit the new resident of the Oval Office, I don’t expect the financial markets to be in any better shape, but who knows? What I am more certain of, which I mentioned last month, is that marketing accountability will once again become a paramount concern for marketers.
Last week a friend of mine, who has a developed a pretty slick yet simple marketing budget management app, sent out an email campaign to a list of prospects. He does this about every month, gets some leads, and hopes to close a couple deals. Typical stuff. Until last week his messaging was rather generic, but with this last campaign he was laser-focused on cost-cutting and the ability to manage those savings in an automated fashion.
Guess what? Not surprising, highest response rate ever. His lead creation rate was 15%, versus an average of 2 to 3% in all previous campaigns.
Marketing accountability is clearly becoming important to all of us.
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