Image credit to Appirio, quite simply THE salesforce integration company
“Apps companies get acquired, and platform companies get acquired. To be a strategic supplier, with off the shelf solutions, and custom apps, you need to offer both.”
So said Byron Sebastian, general manager at Heroku and Salesforce.com SVP of Platform at Dreamforce last week. Many of my peers have already posted about the event, so I am a little late to the party, but hopefully I’m now far enough away from the polish and razzmatazz [Oliver Marks speaks of “marketing & presentation genius on a par with Apple“] to add something to the analysis. Talking of being late to the party, I am certainly a late comer to the Salesforce ecosystem – this was the 11th Dreamforce, but only my first. The reason is pretty simple – I am a middleware guy, a software guy, a developer and maker advocate, rather than someone focused on enterprise apps and the the people that buy them. For an apps view I suggest you take a look at Dennis Howlett writing on Salesforce gunning for manufacturing ERP and Reflections On Workday, Dreamforce and SAP.
The whole idea of “No Software” has always struck me as kind of silly [see my self-description above], although I understand the key point being made – software and systems are generally complex, and hard to manage – Cloud and SaaS models can mitigate a great deal of this. Thus for example – how about rolling out changes to Value Added Taxation across an entire retail company in one day? What is more No Software has clearly worked fantastically well as a slogan for Marc Benioff and cloud company he built. So I will park my skepticism and bow to the marketing.
Talking of marketing, when I touched down in San Francisco I was blown away by the fact Dreamforce is seemingly as big as Oracle OpenWorld. The streets were teaming with light blue lanyards, and SF had shut down Howard Street on either side of the Moscone center the same way they do for Oracle. The house band was Metallica [not huge fans I hear] and the House DJ was Will.i.am of Black Keys fame.
Benioff kept crowing about 40k+ attendees, which I couldn’t entirely understand. Isn’t it better to have the best conference rather than the biggest. Not when you’re competing with Oracle I guess… an old friend of RedMonk, Oren Teich of Heroku, put me straight on that one on Day 2. I had been impressed by the quorum of leading apps companies that had chosen to integrate with the Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise Twitter clone – Concur, Infor, and Workday. Details were thin, which may reflect the work in process aspects of the announcements. Chatter is a first step – deeper Force.com at the data level is coming. So what about these partners? As Teich explained:
