Dreamforce 2008 opened to the tune of happy clouds...9000+ attendees representing 40+ countries attending over 250 sessions. In day one's keynote CEO Marc Benioff provided a company update and then focused mostly on Force.com, the platform as a service (PaaS) offering. In Salesforce.com (SFDC) language SaaS = the CRM applications and Cloud = PaaS. Throughout his presentation and throughout the conference SFDC never missed an opportunity to reenforce their definition of SaaS and cloud, which as always is based on three things: 1. Multi-tenancy, 2. pay as you go and 3. elasticity. Since I've already blogged on the multi-tenancy concept I won't digress into that argument again here. According to Marc SFDC now has 47,700+ paying customers and added over 4100 net new last quarter. The customers appear to be spread across all size bands from small to enterprise. From a corporate strategy standpoint they use 1. manage, 2. share and 3. build, with manage and share referring to the CRM apps offerings and build tied to Force.com.
During the first day keynotes there were several announcements of note, all focused on Force.com. Adding functionality to the platform was Force.com Sites, the capability to build and operate public and private web sites from SFDC's platform. Pricing is based on the customer's tiered SFDC CRM pricing and includes a number of page views (varies by customer tier) for "free" in the base pricing...usage over the base number is priced at a very nominal $1000 / month for 1,000,000 and $3000 for 5,000,000.
The real exciting announcements IMHO centered around platform partnerships with Amazon and facebook. According to Marc there are 4 high profile platforms in the "cloud", Google (already a SFDC partner), Force.com, facebook and Amazon Web Services. The announcement with facebook combines the two platforms with social apps on Force.com and Force.com for facebook. This combination enables customers to build on Force.com and run those apps on facebook or connect to facebook to make Force.com apps "social". The customer example used was Starbucks and took MyStarbucks Idea (which uses SFDC Ideas technology) and embedded it on facebook (they also used Force.com Sites to build new web pages for Starbucks). The second partner announcement was Force.com for Amazon Web Services and enables Force.com customers to use Amazon's EC2 massive compute and S3 massive storage capabilities.
As Force.com starts to mature SFDC is pushing to move more ISV's to develop "native" Force.com apps. According to SFDC reports there are around 50 available today. Appirio, an ISV that I've meet with a few times, is one of the native ISV partners along with CODA (who introduced a simple financial app at Dreamforce) and Fujitsu (Glovia Intl.). To encourage ISV's to develop native apps SFDC is offering a no charge to sell through program until 2010 that is referred to as the Native Apps Pilot.
And one of the most exciting moments during the first day keynotes came when Rock legend Neil Young took the stage with Marc to talk about his new venture, LincVolt. Neil's dream with this venture is to design a 0 emissions vehicle that is created by converting existing cars, in his case a 1959 Lincoln Continental. The venture launched a new web site built on Force.com Sites where you can follow Neil's journey in the his electric classic car.
Day two keynotes focused on the Winter '09 CRM release. In a welcome change from last year when the focus was almost entirely on the Force.com platform, there were several new features rolled out for the CRM customers. Brett Queener, who leads CRM product strategy, talked about these new features including enhancements in all three areas: marketing, sells and service. The addition of Instranet's knowledgebase product that was acquired earlier this year is a key enhancement as well as opportunity splitting, campaigns, in-line scheduler, several iPhone apps, agent console, new page layout editor, social network integration, etc. Partner management added Portal, Salesforce to Salesforce (S2S, which is now free) and Salesforce Partner Networks. There was a lot of talk about SFDC Ideas on both days with MYStarbucks Idea and Dell IdeaStorm as the leading two examples. All in all it does seem like SFDC is paying more attention to the CRM product again even if social CRM discussions were mostly limited to Ideas, the content management app (which uses the wisdom of crowds concepts) and the social network integration (facebook as the example).
One last comment on the keynote, the second day keynote was very Dell heavy and in fact when Michael Dell took the stage it turned into a Dell commercial. This was not lost on the audience however who voted with their feet...
This was a very positive Dreamforce in general and despite the current economic woes there was a lot of enthusiasm and energy exhibited by the SFDC customers and partners.
