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August 30th 2011 marked day 1 of Dreamforce, the largest cloud computing event of the year. The Traction office was buzzing before Dreamforce and is exciting to share some of the key highlights of the conference now that it’s over.
Day 1
Walking to the Moscone Center we began to realize that this Dreamforce would be bigger and better then ever before. With more then 45,000 attendees, an amazing line-up of keynote speakers and Metallica bringing down the house, we couldn’t wait. The Moscone center was split up into four different sections. The geek zone (developers…), registration area, conference area and breakout area. In addition, the Intercontinental and Marriott hotels were fully booked. With all the excitement, Oracle couldn’t even stay away from the expo (clearly not the #1 CRM).
After registering (not an easy feat) and getting our hands on the ‘swag bag’ we were all set for a busy week.
Day 2:
Day 2 opened with Marc Benioff giving an amazing opening keynote on how ‘social’ technologies are revolutionizing business. The’ Social Enterprise’ is here to stay and it is creating huge opportunities for those that embrace it (see the embedded video below for the first 20 minutes of M. Benioff’s keynote).
Traction’s founder and CEO, Greg Malpass also spoke to a group of about 1000 Salesforce.com professionals. His session on clean data was one of the most attended breakouts of the entire conference. Congratulations Greg! Another highlight for Traction during Dreamforce was the Metallica and Will I Am concert. Although it took some work to get inside, it was well worth it. We managed to get really close to the action thanks to our friends at the Yellow Pages Group.
Day 3:
By day 3, the long nights and early mornings were starting to wear on us (especially after the Metallica concert). At the same time, we were still hearing about the countless Salesforce.com enhancements coming out in the next couple releases. The two that stood out to me the most were the data.com announcement (read more here) and the ability to invite external parties into a Chatter group. Salesforce also announced that they were publicly releasing database.com along with a visual process tool (known as Visual Process Manager) that will make implementations and administration much easier. The day ended off with Eric Schmidt’s closing keynote (check it out here) and ensuring we didn’t leave Dreamforce without a picture with Sassy.
Before we left San Fran, Traction invited close to 100 of our clients and partners to join us for a cocktail party at the Red Room in the Clift Hotel. It was great to put names to faces and connect with everyone outside of project deadlines amongst other things. Thanks to everyone who came and see you at Dreamforce 2012!
