Dreamforce Europe 08: The introduction

London, 7 May 2008 - Salesforce.com, for the first time since its foundation in 1999, has organized its Dreamforce event in Europe. Around 2000 customers, partners and developers have joined this event, representing the largest Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) conference.
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in SaaS and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
The Force.com PaaS provides a comprehensive Cloud Computing architecture aiming at revoltionizing application creation and delivery.
Provided completely as a service via the Internet, the Force.com Platform provides the necessary building blocks to enable business apllication creation and delivery, without the need for software and client-server infrstructure.

My travel and partecipation to the event has been organized by LEWIS Communications, specifically by Simonetta Radice from the Italian site and Alicia Gonzales from UK: thanks to them for all their efforts to make my permanence and transportation as comfortable as possible. Considering this was the first event organized in Europe by Salesforce.com, well, we can say that it has all gone quite well, maybe also thanks to an incredibly sunny weather for London.
In this first video we see the huge amount of people that has taken part at the event at the Barbican centre.
At the VIPs' lunch I was lucky to meet Chris Townsend, a researcher from Forrester and to have an interesting chat on the economical and cultural challenges and differences between US and Europe. In any case, a good fellow to spend some time with.
Ok, enough, just have a look at the video and at the fascinating first presentation about the computing evolution. In this video you can find the entire concept of Salesforce.com: introducing a new level of abstraction to permit a new development generation, without the hassles of software installation and application deployment.
In the following posts I will upload some tremendous videos of Keynotes and press meetings where the most influent speakers of Salesforce.com present the new concepts and answer to our questions. In this Journey you will understand what I was referring before with a new level of abstraction, or meta-level, for the purists ;). In fact, even if Salesforce.com is seen as the leader of the SaaS and On-Demand concepts, I think few customers and prospects have really understood that Salesforce (and now the entire Force.com platform) is not a "classic" CRM software: as analyst, I can say that now Salesforce.com, after the opening of the Apex code to configure the application behaviour, is the only REAL Packaged Application in the market. For sure, it's the only vendor that has understood and really exploited the benefits of software components reusal and customization, in comparsion with green-field development. To understand the root of this idea you can refer to the post I wrote 1 year and a half ago about my Ph.D. work, behind the UML in CRM concept. By the way, we are working on these Ideas to come up with a brand new methodology for CRM project implementations: with our new framework every on-premises relying customer will be able to achieve all the SaaS benefits without renouncing to their existing architecture.

Following you can find part of the introduction done by Marc Benioff for the opening general session. It's not complete, but you can find it at the Salesforce.com offical site. Stay tuned for the real juicy material!!