Anticipating Dreamforce
Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual user meeting and thought leadership confab, is two weeks away and the anticipation for this event is palpable. In a tough economy people are looking for the company to do some magic and lift our spirits.
The company did a smart thing by turning on its new collaboration product, Chatter, for any attendee wanting to communicate, synch or share an idea. The result is a Facebook-like storm on Chatter about Dreamforce. In the process, thousands of people who had no familiarity with Chatter are educating themselves.
It’s a no brainer to me that the Chatter coverage coming out of Dreamforce will be a bit better for all of the familiarizing. This is quite different from how we all came out of Dreamforce (was it just last year?) when the company introduced the idea. The problem was that the description had to be done in terms that many people were not expert in. What a difference a year can make.
Dreamforce has taken on an aspect of secular saturnalia with quasi-religious undertones as people comment that it’s late this year, as if they were describing Easter. And it is late, so late that the December date will do little to help any exhibitor finish the quarter well but it may prove to be a good injection of enthusiasm for the year ahead.
Unlike Easter though, which is calculated by a lunar calendar, Dreamforce is calculated according to the Moscone Center. I suppose you could contemplate a Dreamforce in New Orleans, Orlando, Chicago or Las Vegas, but salesforce.com has such a strong tie to San Francisco, that it’s doubtful it would ever move the event. So the wait for space on the Moscone calendar is what determines when Dreamforce starts.
Like the company that sponsors it, Dreamforce is many things and it morphs from year to year as products roll out and company marketing plans and market demand changes. Salesforce has been careful over the years not to simply extend its CRM product line but to add new lines of business. Dreamforce reflects this and consequently it will resemble multiple events rolled into one. Just as Oracle Open World has major tracks for its applications, database, Java and Sun for instance, Salesforce will feature tracks for CRM, its social technologies — especially Chatter, its platform and its development tools.
The Salesforce product line has spread out so much that two people could easily go to Dreamforce and see two completely different events—especially if one of them is a developer who gets sucked into all of the sessions about the platform and its related parts. And it’s assumed there will be more parts to talk about once the show starts.
I expect important announcements in most areas. CRM is perhaps the most mature part of the company’s offerings in what has become a mature market but the introduction of the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud combined with the re-think of the associated business processes will provide opportunity for many new ideas.
Chatter offers a fresh perspective on collaboration and I hope there will be more discussion about how to use it effectively than about how to implement it. From what I’ve seen implementation amounts to turning it on. It’s like calling people to Thanksgiving dinner, you don’t really need to teach the how to eat. So stories from some of the sixty thousand companies now using Chatter is all that’s needed.
Then there’s the platform. In the last two years the rest of the vendor community has played catch up with Salesforce in cloud computing. Everyone has a flavor of it today and most vendors straddle the fence offering single and multi-tenant implementations that deliver on the literal interpretation of SaaS but leave the benefits of multi-tenancy to discretion.
Perhaps that’s as it should be, we can’t expect a wholesale change to multi-tenancy over night for two important reasons. First, many customers can’t or won’t contemplate the idea and second, many vendors can’t contemplate the business model change. For them, multi-tenancy will happen in about ten years, the next time they discover that their cloud computing paradigm didn’t really protect them from obsolescence.
But back to the platform. Salesforce has always had a lead over traditional vendors that varied in length but was always centered on its platform. There have been important platform innovations in the last year or so including the VMforce effort but I think it’s time for something else. So it might be that the biggest new product announcement will be in the platform area. That would make sense because it would give the company time to consolidate its Chatter rollout on the application side of the business.
Other things to think about for Dreamforce: Bill Clinton and Stevie Wonder. There’s no moss growing on Bill Clinton. Since leaving the Whitehouse he’s been a tireless worker for humanitarian causes and his keynote, “Embracing our Common Humanity” is eagerly anticipated. Then there is the incomparable Stevie Wonder who will bring his hefty songbook to Dreamforce. To me, there is no one in modern music who combines the musicianship and lyrical dexterity of this man and I predict there will be dancing in the aisles.
So that’s what I think about Dreamforce going in. I will post more comments from the event and hope to get some pics to share as well. Meanwhile, have a great Turkey Day and Go Patriots!
The Case for Massive Collaboration
Sometimes I feel like we’re stuck in the weeds with Social CRM. Hopefully I will get a lot of mail for this, LOL!
No, really. Sometimes I feel like we’re missing the bigger point of social CRM because we’re spending so many brain cells focusing on the technology and not so much on what it does beyond the basics.
I know, there are plenty of examples of analyses that say what a wonderful job social media does in connecting everyone or improving the customer experience, but the discussion tends to stop there. If it went on, which I admit it sometimes does, it would talk about the wonderful reasons for caring to connect everyone, namely the opportunity for mass collaboration.
I have been guilty of coming from the other direction for a long time and talking almost exclusively about mass collaboration. Neither has been terribly useful IMHO though the technology approach at least got a lot of people to try it out while the mass collaboration approach is known to a smaller group of technology aficionados.
The “Gee isn’t this cool technology” approach is a phase but so is the other. Cool technology launches early adopters and who is to say they’re wrong? They are the folks who actually come up with the practical applications for a technology that guys like me write about. We’ve been in the cool technology phase for a while now with Social and perhaps that time has been extended by the recession. Fewer companies are willing to take on something that has little track record when the name of the game is revenue.
Perhaps that’s why I am becoming such a fan of Chatter from Salesforce. It’s not a perfect product, but for something so new it commands a lot of attention. It’s often compared to Twitter or Facebook but for the enterprise. Not a bad strategy for a new category—compare it to something that is popular—but the comparison leaves Chatter at a disadvantage because it’s more than that.
While Facebook and Twitter enable a certain kind of mass collaboration, it’s all personal—you and your friends massively collaborating about things tangential to or part of your life, pretty much. Chatter does the same thing but if we leave the discussion here, we miss much. In a business context massive collaboration has an output associated with it called co-creation of value.
Co-creation of value is most commonly surfaced when we talk about interactions with customers that surface unmet needs and desires. But the massive collaboration within an enterprise can be just as powerful if it surfaces needs that exist in the moment and if those needs can be communicated to all those who have a stake in a customer outcome.
Salesforce’s approach to capturing input through social media in ways that can be monetized goes deeper than Chatter to the Sales Cloud and the Service Cloud. In their own ways, these tools capture input from sales people and customers respectively that can do much more than trade information about personal matters. They all create some form of intellectual property that is of value to the organization.
This is all a long way from being “like” Facebook or Twitter and it’s a dividing line between social media for personal use and social media for corporate use and that’s why I say Chatter is a new category.
Even more important than figuring this out—I am sure you already did, I am just slow—is that for social CRM to be an important attribute leading us out of the recession, it has to be able to show an ROI and I think this is how you do it. Massive collaboration leads to unique intellectual property. What could be better?
Well, have you seen at gas prices lately? They jumped twenty cents at the beginning of October in my neighborhood and they were already in nosebleed territory when I was in San Francisco for Open World. Four bucks a gallon was a contributor to the recession and we’re getting back to that range now.
That price won’t stop people from driving totally but the Transportation Department did note that we drove 122 billion miles less in the year when gas prices spiked, so it had some effect on business. Add to that jet fuel prices synch with gasoline and you get some worrying signs.
If we’re heading toward costly transportation in the near future, we’ll need some help replacing transportation with the next best thing. To my mind that isn’t massive adoption of Skype video calls, though that’s a good idea too. To me the no-brainer is enabling massive collaboration throughout your shop.
I just wanted to share this with you—and I do not own any Salesforce stock by the way (NYSE:CRM).
CloudForce San Jose
Tell them what you are going to say, say it and then tell them what you told them. The rule of three, that’s the Salesforce.com approach to its market outreach and it has served them well over the last decade. Tuesday was part three of the Chatter cycle in which the company culminated nearly a year of activity by announcing general availability of the product. Today they’ll start working on what to say at Dreamforce something they’ll be talking about for 2011. I can summarize the importance of the announcement, which was held at the San Jose Convention Center, can in several points.
First, the timeline of Chatter’s development is an important proof point for Force.com. In only eight months, Salesforce went from concept to general availability. There may be other companies that have delivered a product in eight months or less but the importance here is that Salesforce was not building a common database application and they were not simply deploying something that was already built.
They were iterating and, in part, inventing a new style of application so I expect there was a lot of iterative prototyping going on. That’s a bit more overhead and speaks well to the platform’s robustness. I am surprised no one made a big deal about the platform during this announcement. Maybe it was a missed opportunity or maybe something had to be left unsaid or we’d still be there.
Second, while Salesforce had other social applications to cull ideas from such as Facebook, Chatter is different because it is focused on the business organization as opposed to personal relationships. Chatter enables a higher degree of collaboration than earlier purpose built tools or earlier product categories like email. At lunch press members asked CEO Marc Benioff if he had hard numbers and we were told that numbers would be forthcoming.
That’s not surprising given that Tuesday was the first day of general availability. But the company said it was eating its own dog food and that six thousand companies were now Chatter enabled so I would expect some data soon. Caveat: like they say about mileage, yours may vary.
The interesting thing to me and the real power of Chatter is that as a collaboration tool it integrates — no intercalates — itself with a business application. Rather than asking you to use a separate piece of software for the purpose of collaboration, Chatter is built into the application and thus brings collaboration to the user. The impact is clear. Collaboration can now be something that’s an accepted part of business practice rather than something you formally do with a separate tool at a prescribed time. The result should be the savings we asked about at lunch.
I think collaboration has a strong role to play in sustainability — not for green reasons but because better communication leads to better understanding and if you can drive understanding through software it makes other forms of communication less necessary. Ever since humans domesticated the horse the preferred mode of communication and collaboration — which literally means working together — was to be face to face or in the same room. With collaboration tools it’s now possible to work together apart, if you follow my drift.
The benefit this provides to modern business is huge, of course. But it also means a renewed emphasis on mobility which Salesforce was only too happy to promote. Salesforce has done a lot to ensure its applications — including Chatter — run on popular mobile platforms including BlackBerry devices, iPhones and now the iPad. Not content to simply run in a browser on the iPad, Benioff announced and showed an iPad native application to be available later this year.
Of course, with mobility and collaboration workers can be anywhere as long as they have Internet access and they can participate and be relevant to any internal business process and that will be increasingly important if and when we see fuel prices head north again.
So forgive me if this seems like it’s rambling but if you’ve been here before you know the themes. There are a lot of ideas to sum up. Chatter is released, it represents the start of the collaboration era, not because Salesforce was the first to bring a product to market but because it was very early to figure out how to embed it in real business processes. Collaboration is essential to making our business processes more sustainable and that’s a theme we’ll be living with for the rest of our lives.
Salesforce planning June announcement
Save the date. Salesforce.com is planning an announcement in late June and the analyst and press communities have been notified that “Marc Benioff will be presenting and there will be news.” (That last part sounds like a movie title to me.) But as usual, the company is being mum about what the news will be.
The hints I’ve seen are interesting and surprising. The interesting part is that in all likelihood there will be new chatter about Chatter. Salesforce does very good marketing blocking and tackling using the rule of threes — announce something, deliver it and then tell us what you delivered just to remind us. For Chatter we’ve been through the first two phases with the announcement last month that the beta is going well. So in June look for the company to announce end of beta, general availability and a bumper crop of customers with stories to tell. Maybe there’ll be a Chatter partnership announcement.
Or not. Salesforce is also very good at doing the unexpected. So what we know for sure is June 22.
Now for the surprising part. The announcement event will be in San Jose not San Francisco. With San Jose being the center of a lot of programming prowess and home to some major tech players, I get the feeling that the event could be more about VMForce or something else related to the platform than Chatter. Or maybe they just needed a bigger hall? It’s at the San Jose Convention Center.
So this is where things get a little squirrely. I have no guidance on this and the best I can do is guess and that guess wouldn’t be worth much. On the other hand, Salesforce tends to have a reason to assemble the press and analyst corps about once per quarter and I think they only did a small thing in Q1 so it’s nice to see them back on schedule. More importantly, other vendors are stepping up their marketing and outreach and that’s another sure sign that the recession is loosening its grip.
Well, that’s what I know; Salesforce is announcing something in San Jose in June.
