The Blog

  • February 28, 2013
  • Salesforce.com Platform Powered Obama Re-Election

    The technology world made significant behind the scenes contributions on behalf of both political parties in the recent presidential election.  That was all kept out of the spotlight for good reasons during the campaign but now that it’s all over some of the people involved are talking, most notably the people at Salesforce who provided IT services to the Obama campaign.

    No doubt you recall how close the election seemed and how some people were using old style gut feel to predict a GOP victory. Meanwhile people like Nate Silver of the New York Times and MSNBC were using data analysis and regression testing and who knows what else to tease apart reams of data to arrive at very different conclusions.

    The data came from many sources and much of it was collected on iPads and mobile devices and sent to Salesforce.com where the national campaign workers could aggregate, cull and analyze the data and then deploy resources exactly where they were needed.  It’s very difficult to discuss almost anything political these days and in New York Marc Benioff emphasized that this week when he introduced this video.

    Forget about who won, who you backed and all the other stuff.  This is about something else.  This video is about how a billion dollar organization came to life and ran full tilt changing its software on the fly as needs arose.  As a business case it’s pretty stark too because unlike business an election is a one time thing, the #2 company in a market might still have plenty of opportunities but not a political candidate.  That’s one of the things that make this video and what the Obama team did using Salesforce so interesting.

     

    Published: 11 years ago


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