Dreamforce ’13 in Review:

After the whirl wind that was two weeks ago, I can honestly say that Dreamforce was by far the biggest and best conference that I’ve ever been apart of. All the hype surrounding the events, the speakers, and the possibilities of Salesforce absolutely lived up to my expectations. Thinking about everything that I saw, learned and heard about in San Francisco, it has created a sense of excitement about the SaaS industry that we’re apart of! The three things that stood out to me most throughout the three days included:

Chatter is at the heart of a lot of businesses
Partner applications are increasing salesforce adoption, and
By leveraging the force.com platform there isn’t a business challenge you cannot solve

The first keynote that I attended was the partner (ISV) keynote, which highlighted the importance of the AppExchange. This year the AppExchange grew to over 2000 applications and drew in over 1 billion dollars in revenue! If we consider that there are over 150,000 Salesforce customers installing applications, this shows that the average customer will spend over $6500 each year with ISV partners. The importance of the AppExchange partners resonated extremely well in the keynote. Not only was the first keynote focused on ISV partners, over 350 partners were showcasing over 1000 applications in the partner expos that spanned across 2 different venue locations. If you’re a business who’s thinking about building an application for the AppExchange, prepare for a very in-depth process, but it clearly appears to be worth it.

The Chatter keynote was one that stood out to me for a few reasons.

The first thing that stood out to me was the fact that not only is Chatter a major differentiator for business collaboration, it is prominently positioned at the core of the new Salesforce 1 application. The second thing I noted was the importance of the cloud. Being a cloud company, Salesforce has allowed us to have all of our information available any place, any time and on any device! The keynote highlighted the Salesforce1 functionality and used great examples from companies like Nestle, hp and Unilever. Chatter is clearly at the core of these businesses! If you missed the keynote, you can always revisit how these companies are driving their businesses through collaboration at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2mbg5eVt6KA#t . The third thing that stood out was that ISV partners were called out as major contributors of the successes of Nestle, hp and Unilever. Vidyard completed our integration into Salesforce and had PR a few days leading up to Dreamforce and is tightly integrated into Salesforce1 http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/box-linkedin-evernote-docusign-all-debut-salesforce1-apps-df13-023266.php . Watching our application be highlighted in the keynote with Nestle was incredible and having Vidyard be asked to stand up by the EVP & GM of Chatter Nasi Jazayeri to highlight the work we’ve done was probably the best part of Dreamforce for me.

The last thing that clearly stood out to me was that you really can do anything on the Salesforce platform! Watching Marc Benioff talk so passionately about the cloud and connecting customers, products and companies was extremely exciting! The internet of things is truly amongst us. Marc started talking about connected products with his Philips toothbrush that was both WiFi and GPS enabled so that his dentist would truly know if he was brushing. This was only the beginning! We then saw how service calls on MRI machines using Google Glasses through the Salesforce1 application. A tech back at HQ was providing assistance to the onsite tech through the images of the Google glasses. The onsite tech took pictures of what he was seeing and uploaded those to a Chatter group and in real time had people weigh in on the issue. SONY smart watches were also being used in the ADP demo to remind you who’s in the room by having their picture show up on the smart watch. Having your product connect with your customers and ultimately your company is absolutely where the future is taking us! All of the demos that were being shown could not have been done without the help of the ISV partners.

Marc Benioff also shared that a 2013 study The state of the customer lead economoy of 1300 Global Executives shared ½ of the companies are looking to deploy applications in the next year which is what he called the App Gap. Vidyard is proud to be apart of the Salesforce AppExchange and being integrated into Salesforce1 today! If you went to Dreamforce or are an ISV partner, it would be great to hear your feedback!

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