Dreamforce Europe 08: Post-keynote Q&A conference

After the general opening session, Marc Benioff has exposed himself to the questions of the press and analysts. I succeded on posing 2 questions, among the more than 30 that I prepared... probably I exagerated... In any case some of the questions coming from my colleagues were very interesting and covered many aspects I was interested in as well.
In this exclusive video you can follow the interaction with Marc Benioff and his answers to the press. The first touched arguments have been cloud computing and the Salesforce.com position on this, difference in audience between the US and the European events, China's future CRM evolution, Force.com objectives and performance, etc.
One example of interesting question has been about the competition between Salesforce.com and Google, although the answer was quite short.

My first question was based on the observation that the new level of IT possibilities offered by the on-demand concept, the cloud computing architecture and the AppExchange community, offers a tremendous availability of software functionalities to all the customers. This broadening of new IT features is also the trend of every CRM software vendor that, based on years of projects implementations (and failures as well), includes new functionalities on their software often basing on custom solutions that the customers implemented themselves in order to overcome the functional limitations of the chosen package. If this is fair or not, I think it's a matter of the customers, after the millions of euros or dollars spent on these.
Salesforce in any case is bringing this concept to the extreme, giving it also a new foundation, a precise identity on which basing an entire new trend. In this way the entire movement is justified, as potentially accesible and available to everyone.
So I started from the idea that CRM is an acronym that was created by Tom Siebel, but slowly moved into a more "business" oriented movement, into a "Journey".
Is it all then? it's IT just the supporting application of the CRM processes and it cannot make anymore the difference in terms of solutions in the competition among organizations for the acquisition and retainance of customers?

My second question was more focused on the future of Salesforce.com: born as a CRM software solution provider (even if on-demand, as a SaaS), has now moved to the Platform as a Service concept, opening its Force.com platform to its customers for the development of new applications. Is so Saleforce.com still interested in developing solutions of its own, or it's more interested now in the platform and looking at what the clients and partners are going to implement with their framework?
Benioff explained that a lot of applications on the AppExchange servers are by Salesforce.com, but nothing was mentioned about some new brand ideas for a new killer application.
My sensation is that the IT market is somehow saturating and the public is not yet aware of the difference between a classic software and its programming languages and their meta layers, the meta-langauges.
The possibilites offered by salesforce.com in fact rely on a higher conceptual definition, enabling users to customize their applications in a simpler way. Without a definition of an M2 level (referring to the 3 layer OMG framework in relation to the UML), this would not have been possible. The Apex code works at this level... more about this will be published on a new post.

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!!

About Salesforce.com

We have been writing a lot about SalesForce.com, and probably will continue doing it. Nevertheless, there still might be some reader that does not know who SalesForce is. So, for the ones that would like to have an overview or just more details, we have prepared this post about SalesForce history, with our personal interpretation.

Salesforce.com was born in 1999, when few persons were thinking that on-demand was really worth something and most of them would laugh about the idea of having a hosted CRM system. Still, some pioneers believed in the on-demand CRM advantages: immediate benefits at reduced risks and costs. Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez grounded this innovative venture in spring 1999.
Marc Benioff, a former Oracle and Apple employee, takes charge as CEO. He started quite early with implementing his ideas about philanthropy: in 2000 the SalesForce Foundation and the 1/1/1 model (one percent of profits, one percent of equity, and one percent of employee hours dedicated to philanthropy) were founded.
The first years were crucial for developing partnerships and strengthening relationships (AOL, Dell, TIBCO, IBM are some actors to be named). Google is one of the early partners that SalesForce.com has on its side, and we are going to see in the following why this is important.
It is interesting to notice that some of the ideas that SalesForce managed to develop lately were already there in the beginning: Force.com is based on an initial project in the early years of SalesForce: Sforce.
2003 is the year when SalesForce’s revenues doubled (for the first time), while it is becoming a recognized figure in the business with various awards. This is also the year of the first Dreamforce event, a yearly tradition continuing today (see Dreamforce 08).
The growth continues in 2004 with new partnerships, clients and employees that chose SalesForce over its competition. Integration and customization developments are brought in to improve the application that is now expanding to various businesses. This is also the year SalesFroce went public (the ticker is CRM!) with an IPO that raised from the proposed 8-9 $ a share to 11$ a share because of the requests. Is this a sign for its future development?
2005 marks the basis for extending the SalesForce platform beyond CRM and encourage the customers to develop applications on this new web platform. Leadership in the CRM on-demand sector becomes clear as SalesForce has nearly eight times as many subscribers as its rival Siebel on-demand. AppExchange – a show case for various applications complementing or going beyond the CRM one - is launched offering new grounds for application customization and extension for SalesForce.com customers. In the beginning, there are 70 new launch applications available for immediate preview (in 2008 it has over 700!). The Salesforce Sandbox is also introduced with the aim of providing customers a replica of their existing Salesforce deployment for streamlining the process of customizing, building and deploying new on-demand applications to enable them to manage and share information on-demand across their entire enterprise.
In 2006 SalesForce.com demonstrates its engagement for transparency and openness with the new trust.salesforce.com - a systems status website giving salesforce.com customers and community access to real-time and historical system performance information and updates, incident reports and maintenance schedules across all its key system components. There is also a new tool for Apex development in Eclipse that provides developers with tools to customize, integrate and build on-demand applications on the platform, while being offline. PartnerForce is also introduced in 2006, a partner relationship management totally integrated with the classic CRM application. Moreover, Salesforce for Google AdWords is launched - it delivers for the first time, an end-to-end, on-demand service that allows companies to create, manage, and measure search engine marketing campaigns, all from directly within Salesforce. By this new functionality, a support for the much market-desired control over marketing spending is provided.
This last step underlines the relationship between SalesForce and Google, not only as business partners but as allies with common interests and strategies, in fact, in 2007 they sign a strategic global alliance. In June 2007, Salesforce.com and Google launched Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords™, which has become a valuable tool for thousands of businesses by encapsulating every element of the customer life-cycle - advertising, lead generation, sales, and customer support - in one solution.
SalesForce carries on the development of its various applications and offers, and awards continue to rain on it. Force.com, the SalesForce platform, now offers global infrastructure and services for database, logic, workflow, integration, user interface, and application exchange. Winter 08 introduces Ideas (customers’ feedback and requirements gathering portal) and Content (content management integrated with the CRM application) as new functionalities.
With almost 5000 clients in 2001, the company reaches 40.000 clients and over 1 million end users in 2008. Moreover, the idea is now evolving: it is not just CRM on-demand in a multi-tenant web-platform, SalesFroce.com is the leader of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Google and SalesForce.com bring their relationship one step further with the integration of GoogleApps and SalesForce putting the foundations for cloud computing in the business environment.
One observation about SalesForce philanthropy is needed: their 1/1/1 model is growing as SalesForce is thinking of incorporating a “1” for ecology…although we wonder what that means and how they are going to do it.
With this rich, although short, history at its back, we are still guessing where SalesForce.com could eventually arrive.

Here are some of the awards and recognitions Salesforce.com has received:
• Technology of the Year (InfoWorld, 2004, 2005, 2006)
• Editors' Choice Award (PC Magazine, 2002, 2003, 2004)
• Visionary Award (SDForum, 2004)
• Best of the Web (Forbes, 2003)
• CRM Excellence Award (Customer Inter@ction Solutions, 2003, 2004, 2005,
2006)
• Top 100 Innovators Award (BusinessWeek, 2006)
• Innovation Award (AMR Research, 2005)
• CODIE Award for Best CRM (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)