SaaSkatoon: All Things SaaS!

We headed out to San Francisco last week for Dreamforce, the annual salesforce.com user conference. While the primary objective was to learn about the future direction of Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform, I also wanted to put my finger on the pulse of cloud computing in the enterprise and validate my optimism for 2010 and beyond. With over 15,000 people attending Dreamforce, and a party scene reminiscent of the Dot Com days, I came home with great enthusiasm and little doubt that “the cloud” has reached the tipping point, and combined with an economic recovery will create a perfect storm scenario in the coming year that will make the innovations of the Dot Com era pale in comparison to what we’re about to see with cloud computing.  Some thoughts:

• The “big announcement” revealed during Marc Benioff’s first of several lengthy keynotes was Salesforce Chatter, a social platform designed to drive collaboration within the Salesforce CRM environment. I can’t say I was all that excited about Chatter until I went to the salesforce.com area of the Expo Hall and got a first-hand look at it. Even though we won’t see it generally available until mid or late 2010, the deep-dive demo that I got helped me to understand the business value of Chatter and how Delivered Innovation will be able to design next generation Salesforce and Force.com systems around a real-time social and collaborative paradigm.
• The session that I was most looking forward to was the discussion on integrating Google Wave with Salesforce.  Unfortunately the Google Product Manager was unavailable, and despite the best efforts of his replacement the session was a disappointment. I’m still trying to wrap my head around whether Wave will be able to provide business value or if it’s just a new toy with a lot of buzz around it.
• The best session that I attended gave a sneak peek of new packaging and patch management tools for commercial applications.  Today, any customer that downloads a package from the AppExchange has to explicitly download and install updated packages in order to upgrade a commercial application; in the near future it will be possible to push patches and version upgrades to customers directly and instantaneously.  The other impressive feature that I did not realize was already available was the ability to apply conditional logic within Apex classes to create branching based on the installed package version in a customer Salesforce org…for all intents and purposes this creates an in-line code branching solution that avoids the complexity of managing multiple class instances within a package.  But for when a situation does call for a code branch to address critical issues and distribute patches, salesforce.com has created a paradigm of parallel development orgs that can be used to branch code and merge it back into the core code base of the original development org for version releases.
• I will chalk it up to growing pains and West Coast time management, but almost nothing ran on schedule during Dreamforce, and I found that to be frustrating at times. Lesson learned – leave some flexibility in your itinerary and be prepared to make choices regarding sessions because Dreamforce was pretty chaotic at times.  And if you’re planning on grabbing some food from a sponsored lunch, get there early.
• I realize that events are huge marketing opportunities, but I walked out of a couple of sessions because I felt like I was being hard sold on messaging that I had long bought into. There may be a fine line between education and indoctrination, but let people drink the Kool Aid by choice…not brute force.
• My biggest takeaway was the genuine enthusiasm that I got from current and potential Salesforce customers that had “found religion” in cloud computing.  It was very exciting to have the opportunity to talk to so many people that had made the conceptual leap and understood the importance of the cloud.

In a broader context, the energy that I felt in San Francisco last week was like nothing that I had experienced since I lived and worked there almost ten years ago.  There were times when I felt as if I had stuck my finger directly into an electrical outlet and kept it there until I boarded the plane home. 2010 is going to be an explosive year, and whether it was Dreamforce itself or just the timing of the event, many of us will look back at this week in San Francisco as the start of a golden era of technology.