Dreamforce 2011 Keynote 2 Highlights
September 2, 2011
After Metallica and will.i.am entertained the masses on Wednesday night the second keynote on Thursday morning was focused on the platform - using the salesforce technology stack to go beyond CRM.
A mainstream platform player
The Force.com platform is now an established enterprise grade option for large (and small) companies to build business software. It was announced that several software companies like Workday, Infor and Concur will be making their products available on Force.com. This is a huge validation for the platform.
Serious about software development
Last Dreamforce the acquisition of Heroku was announced and since then has gathered amazing momentum. The marketing message is now much clearer as to where Heroku fits in the stack - public facing applications to interact with your customers. At a technical level the big announcements were the support of java and enterprise support packages. At Trineo we are quite excited by this as the only Heroku development partner in New Zealand.
Philanthropy
Part of the keynote was dedicated to the efforts of UCSF who are doing some amazing research in the medical field. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has donated $100 million of his own money to the building of a new children’s hospital which is quite amazing.
Eric Schmidt Keynote
The final keynote was an hour long discussion between Marc Benioff and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It was a thought provoking discussion and touched on the technology industry, the problems facing the US and the world at large.
Wrapup
Over the past 3 years we’ve seen Dreamforce more than double from 20k attendees to 45k this year. The energy at the conference is quite something and you won’t find more passionate and evangelical customers. It’s now the biggest technology conference and becoming a must attend event.
Bring on Dreamforce 2012!
Dan Fowlie
With more than a decade in the ecosystem, Dan lives and breathes Salesforce. He applies business acumen to client challenges to come up with solutions that extracts the most value out of the platform. Outside of work, Dan embraces "Kaizen" and likes to hack his day to day life as much as possible.