Dreamforce 2010 – A Newcomer Perspective
In early December I had the chance to attend Dreamforce 2010. Not having been to salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event before, I really didn’t know what to expect. I’ve been to plenty of big trade shows in the past, including COMDEX in Las Vegas back in it’s heyday, and Oracle OpenWorld which fills every hotel in San Francisco.
Somehow I was expecting more hubris and fanfare from this event and I wasn’t really disappointed. 30,000ish attendees was a huge uptick from 20,000ish attendees the year prior. That much growth in interest for the platform is staggering. I’m no analyst but I think this year’s record profits will not stay the high water mark for long. Mark Benioff was entertaining and his potshots at Oracle and Microsoft were predictable and pretty funny. He sounded a lot like his former mentor Larry, even when poking at Larry.
The conference is everything Cloud, with some exhibitors having nothing to do with salesforce.com or force.com, simply being cloud was enough. Even the plastic show badges were shaped like clouds. GreatVines had a nice presence for our size, as we were featured at a press event, Jim demo’ed the Craft Brewers Alliance version of HopVines, and Tim was on the closed circuit TV with Scott from CBA.
The big announcements from salesforce.com were interesting and of high potential impact to salesforce.com. They continue to expand on their platform as a service offerings, by bundling development and database tools to allow partners like us to continue expanding our offerings.
One announcement we had hoped for was the hinted at improvements to the bundled analytics platform within force.com, but we will all have to wait a bit longer it seems. Watch this space….
Overall, a great time and a good opportunity for us to bond as an ever growing team, we had 4 of our 6 full time employees present (watch this space also).
Oh, and congratulations to our own Jeff Huth, who passed the onsite Developer Exam and is now certified. There is a rumor that he got the highest score ever taken on the exam, not sure we will ever know.
