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A review on Dreamforce 2008 and its Cloud Computing

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:November 4, 2008

Salesforce.com , the enterprise cloud computing company, today kicked off its sixth annual Dreamforce Conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco. With thousands of people in attendance, Dreamforce brings together the global salesforce.com community of customers, partners, developers, industry luminaries and employees to share best practices and propel the cloud computing industry forward.

“The excitement surrounding Dreamforce 2008 signals something big — The End of Software,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “Dreamforce gives customers, partners and the rest of our community the opportunity to meet, share their successes, and collectively set the agenda for enterprise cloud computing.”

Salesforce.com made several significant new technology, partnership and product announcements at Dreamforce 2008.

Force.com Sites — Bringing the Power of Force.com to Every Web Application and Web Site

Salesforce.com today unveiled Force.com Sites, a new capability of the Force.com platform that will allow customers to run their Web sites in salesforce.com’s cloud. Force.com Sites will give customers the power to publish Force.com data and applications to any Web site, extending their reach to new users on intranets, external Web sites, and online communities. Like all salesforce.com services, Force.com Sites runs entirely in the cloud without the cost and complexity of traditional software. Force.com Sites is now available in developer preview at http://developer.force.com/.

Force.com for Facebook: Where Social Meets the Enterprise

Salesforce.com and Facebook, the world’s largest online social community, today introduced a new suite of tools to marry next-generation business productivity applications to the interpersonal power of social networks. The new offering — Force.com for Facebook — is designed to foster a global development community for Facebook’s 120 million users and salesforce.com’s 100,000 developers. The move makes Facebook an ‘enterprise-friendly’ platform for global enterprises and individual entrepreneurs worldwide and puts salesforce.com at the forefront of business applications for social computing.

Force.com for Amazon Web Services: New Tools to Better Enable Developer Success

Salesforce.com today announced a new offering, Force.com for Amazon Web Services, to extend the power of cloud computing to even more enterprises. With Force.com for Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprises, ISVs and developers can build powerful new business applications and run them entirely in the cloud, leveraging both the database, logic and user interface features of Force.com and the storage and compute capabilities of Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 services. Through Force.com for AWS, developers can access these services from within the Force.com platform to build applications that seamlessly span both clouds. The capabilities made possible through Force.com for AWS will accelerate the creation and adoption of new kinds of applications in the enterprise that take full advantage of cloud computing.

Salesforce CRM: More Innovation, Delivering More Success

Salesforce.com today redefined CRM with Salesforce CRM’s powerful cloud computing approach. Currently, Salesforce CRM is helping more than 47,700 enterprises and 1.1 million subscribers better serve their customers without any of the cost, risk or complexity of traditional, on-premise software. With more than 50 new features, Salesforce CRM Winter ‘09 enables companies of all sizes to manage their customer interactions across sales, marketing, and customer service. Customers have embraced these new technologies and are receiving extended value and new levels of success from their CRM deployments. Built on the Force.com platform, Salesforce CRM is the fastest, most flexible CRM service on the market today.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company’s portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that customers manage and share business information over the Internet. The company’s Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful on-demand applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com platform, available at http://www.force.com/, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com’s Force.com AppExchange marketplace available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

Keynotes

Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO, salesforce.com

Looking to create an information utility that would make traditional enterprise software technology obsolete, Marc Benioff founded salesforce.com in March 1999. A 25-year veteran of the software industry, Benioff is now regarded as an “End of Software” pioneer. This Dreamforce, don’t miss salesforce.com’s Chairman & CEO as he unveils the next generation of Cloud Computing—and why it’s vital for your business moving forward.

Michael Dell, Chairman & CEO, Dell

What can the youngest CEO ever to manage a Fortune 500 company tell you about the future of your business? Michael Dell founded Dell in 1984 with $1,000 and an unprecedented idea in the computer industry: sell computer systems directly to customers. In nearly 25 years, company revenue has grown from $6 million to $61 billion. The latest global innovation to come from Dell is its leadership on the Web. Mr. Dell has been honored numerous times for his visionary leadership, earning a spot on Time/CNN’s list of the 25 most influential global executives.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point

Deft lateral thinker, detective of fads and emerging subcultures, chronicler of jobs-you-never-knew-existed, Malcolm Gladwell’s work is toppling the popular understanding of bias, crime, food, marketing, race, consumers, and intelligence. The Wall Street Journal recently named Gladwell one of the top five business thought leaders in the world. A New Yorker staff writer since 1996, he’s fashioned a career distinct from other reporters, going well off the beaten path. Pop-R&D gumshoe and wily scout of world-flipping factoids, Gladwell’s dogged search for counterintuitive truth takes him into obscure laboratories and infomercial set kitchens as often as the hangouts of freelance cool-hunters. For that, he’s become a star lecturer and worldwide bestselling author.

Neil Young, Musician, Visionary

Singer/songwriter Neil Young is sometimes visionary, sometimes flaky, sometimes both at once. He has maintained a large following since the early Seventies with music in three basic styles – solo acoustic ballads, sweet country rock, and lumbering hard rock, all topped by his high voice – and he veers from one to another in unpredictable phases. His subject matter also shifts from personal confessions to allusive stories to bouncy throw-aways. A dedicated primitivist, Young is constantly proving that simplicity is not always simple.

Larry Brilliant, Executive Director, Google.org

Dr. Larry Brilliant is the Executive Director of Google.org. In this role, Larry works with the company’s co-founders to define the mission and strategic goals of Google’s philanthropic efforts. Google.org, the umbrella organization for these efforts, includes the Google Foundation as well as Google Grants (the AdWords giving program) and the company’s major initiatives aimed at reducing global poverty, improving the health of the least advantaged in the world, and working to halt or even reverse the effects of the climate crisis.

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook

Sheryl Sandberg is Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, where she manages business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, and communications. Prior to Facebook, Sheryl was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, where she built and managed the online sales channels for advertising and publishing and operations for consumer products globally. She was also instrumental in launching Google’s philanthropic arm. Sheryl was previously Chief of Staff for the United States Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton. Earlier, she was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company and an economist with the World Bank. Sheryl holds a master’s degree in business administration with highest distinction from the Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in economics from Harvard University.

In another news Salesforce partners with Facebook, Amazon to spark more app development, Sam Diaz writes on zdnet

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff doesn’t think companies should be worrying about things like servers and security, software updates and web hosting. In a keynote speech at the company’s Dreamforce conference today, he explained that those sort of things are what he and his company should be worrying about. Instead, companies should be focusing on ways to operate more efficiently, develop new ground-breaking technologies and grow their businesses – especially in this economy.

Sure, salesforce has its own applications that it can provide companies – but salesforce and its partners appear to be more focused on providing the tools that developers can use to create their own applications, those that can be customized to meet a company’s specific needs.

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