What I Hope To Hear About At Dreamforce
September 12 2012 09:39:20 AM
Add/Read Comments [4]
Next week Salesforce is holding their massive Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. I think it's incredible that in just a few years Salesforce has evolved from being a cloud based CRM vendor to now being one of the leading providers of complete social business solutions. Of course it took several hundreds of millions of dollars in acquisitions and marketing, but still can you name another vendor who's had such a rise recently? With that in mind, below is a list of things I hope to hear about next week:
- Salesforce has assembled (via both building and buying) quite a portfolio of products including Chatter, Do, Radian6, GoInstant, Rypple (now work.com), Force.com and others. They have done an excellent job marketing this growing portfolio by use-cases such as Sales, Marketing or Service versus focusing on specific features. Now I'd like to hear more about how they will be integrated from both the technical side (e.g. integration of Chatter and Do and Rypple) as well as pricing and packaging.
- I really like how Salesforce has used customers to tell their stories instead of just pushing the usual marketing buzzword hype. Now I'd like to hear more about the opportunity for their business partner ecosystem. The App Exchange and force.com provide a lot of potential and I'd like to see this highlighted.
- There have been rumours of Salesforce announcing their own file-sharing service to compete with Box, DropBox and others. Will it be an integrated part of Chatter or a new service with an additional price? How feature rich will it be in the first version? Will it be focused on the enterprise only, or will this be a consumer offering geared towards getting more people to know about Salesforce?
- The last version of Chatter introduced integrated chat with the promise of web-conferencing coming soon. I hope it's unveiled next week.
- While Chatter has expanded its features quite rapidly, it's still primarily used for consuming information, not creating it. Will Salesforce unveil native content creation capabilities (blogs, wikis, pages) that can compete with Jive, IBM Connections, Office365, Google Docs, etc? (they acquired Stypi in May)
Finally, while Salesforce has been doing a great job of focusing on areas such as employee collaboration, customer experience and talent management, so are a lot of other vendors. If Salesforce wants to establish a leadership role I'd like to see them announce something completely new and innovative. No not a Salesforce phone or tablet! It takes a lot of vision and resources to break the mould and Salesforce has an abundance of both. My dream for Dreamforce is that a big story emerges, and we don't leave just talking about the new improvements, enhancements and extensions of what they are already doing.
What do you think?
By the way, if you're coming to the conference, I invite you to attend Dion Hinchcliffe and my presentation on The Future of Social Business, Thursday the 20th at 2pm.
Hey! I've been seeing a ton of these "what to expect at Dreamforce" articles going around. I had to laugh as my coworker shared a lighter post of what she was looking forward to at Dreamforce ({ Link } It always blows my mind what a party Dreamforce can be. But, as someone who loves the fun of Dreamforce, but also hopes to learn, I really like your more serious take. I personally, am hoping to end up in some solid content marketing sessions, because I am really wondering how to best manage competing and multiple priorities. It seems like, we're flooded with tools, and how-to's, and tactics to try, but not a lot of training on how to manage it all! (besides having an overly inflated marketing department or never sleeping!)
Hi Alex, thank you for the comment. I was worried when I read "I've been seeing a ton of these", but I'm glad you ended up liking what I wrote. When you mention competing and multiple priorities, are you speaking about within your organization, or between different vendors? If there is anything I can do to help your organization rationalize all the various aspects of social business, please let me know.
Hey Alan,
I am a first timer to DF and looking forward to it.
For me the integration of all the products is key. I want to see one entry point for an organization to get to the solutions, have the products integrated where it makes sense and not have 10 different URL's and passwords. I also fear they are becoming IBM where you need 20 different products to get your "solution". What is the SF version of Blue washing?
The other major aspect for me is on the developer side, as much as I want to buy vs build often the custom development is the differentiator. Their platforms and how we can leverage them is very important.
As for a big announcement I am not really that interested as there is enough to digest. I think they could blow everyone away and change their name from Salesforce to something that reflects where they are going not where they started.
I look forward to catching up.
Cheers
Thanks Ben. Since Salesforce has retracted their attempt to trademark Social Business I guess they won't be changing their name to that! Socialforce.com is taken but just appears to be a parked site. Social.com is taken but does not even resolve. I am sure Benioff could offer a few million for them. I own GettingWorkDone.org and .net if he wants to open his wallet.