I recently attended Dreamforce 2013, the annual event of Salesforce. Mark Benioff CEO of Salesforce.com kicked off the four day annual event with his keynote on Tuesday morning November 19th. An event, attended by 130,000 registered professionals from 123 countries.
The theme of the conference was the “Internet of Customers” connected applications, connected devices and connected marketers. Mr. Benioff, introduced the new “SalesForce 1 Platform”- essentially a mobile offering of the salesforce.com products. The product demo showcased the ease of managing a classic sales cycle from a mobile device with all of the services hosted on cloud. The target market for SalesForce1 is the developers, ISV’s, end users, administrators and customers.
The Service Cloud product offering a contact management customer services center was identified as the highest growth product category for the company hauling in a whopping $1 billion+ in annual sales.
The conference had keynotes for each of its product categories -Sales cloud, Service cloud, Marketing cloud and the Force.com platform. In addition, keynotes from thought leaders like Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo and Sheryl Sandburg COO of Facebook, as well as Deepak Chopra, MD and Founder of the Chopra foundation, made it a complete package.
Numerous enterprise customers like Philips, EDP and Virgin America demonstrated on stage the applications their teams had built on the Force.com platform. The AppExchange market space has over 4,000 applications built using the proprietary salesforce.com programming language “Apex” and Ruby cloud platform “Heroku”.
As one can easily make out from the numerous thought-provoking sessions and engaging demos during the conference, the flavor of the conference was Mobile, with Marissa Mayer sharing how they shifted focus of Yahoo to Mobile first and now accounts for more than 400 million monthly users from mobile devices.
The conference also covered the emergence of the Big Data analytics, a recurring theme throughout the year and how machine data generated from the various sensors and mobile devices could be harnessed. For example, the ability to recognize a consumer when a person enters a department store and sending them targeted marketing and promotional offers.
Overall, it was a great experience to interact and know more about the leading edge product information from Salesforce, witness talks about mobile’s ubiquitous future and hear the candid, real world learnings from expert consultants in Dreamforce 2013 event.
