ReadWriteWeb presents exclusive embedded video of the Dreamforce 2011 conference in San Francisco, with running commentary by Scott Fulton. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff leads the festivities, and he’s beginning by driving home the message that PCs have held users back the way Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Khadafi held back Egypt and Libya, respectively.
A new Salesforce database feature Benioff is announcing today enables data centers to store selected data locally without using it to populate the Salesforce database.
Video for today’s conference appears below, courtesy Ustream.tv:
9:15 am PT The festivities begin with a traditional Hawaiian greeting delivered by Daniel Akaka of Hawaii (son of Sen. Akaka) and his wife. “There’s a feeling in my heart… Stabbing me just like a dart… It’s a feeling heavenly… I see memories from out of the past… Memories that always will last… Of a place across the sea… Waikiki at night when the shadows are falling…” Evidently a reference to a new embedded AppExchange app. Mrs. Akaka is dancing atop a stage emblazoned with the “No Software” logo.
9:21 am PT: The opening video shows some glimpses of Salesforce running in just about everything except a PC. Steve Jobs would feel very happy in this room right now. “We are living in the post-PC revolution,” reads an emblazoned quote from Benioff.
9:23 am PT Benioff takes the stage. 45,000 registered attendees + 35,000 online attendees. “We were born cloud, but today we’re reborn social.”
9:27 am PT: Talking about Salesforce’s own corporate responsibility, and the degree to which the company gives back to the community.
9:28 pm PT: “Let me tell you what I love about my job. It’s the constant, never-ending change. That’s what’s so exciting, what’s constantly changing about our industry. It’s from the mainframes, from IBM and Thomas Watson, and from the era of Bill Gates to control our industry. But we moved past that, thank God, and we moved into the mobile era led by none other than the great Steve Jobs. And now we’re being led into an exciting new era, and this new era that is happening today is this social revolution, and which is why we want to bring you a social enterprise.”
Arab springs, the fall of countries, the deposition of dictators. “And the signs we saw, they didn’t say, ‘Thank you, Microsoft.’ They said, ‘Thank you, Facebook.’ We need to pay attention to that at this conference too. It’s not so long from now we’ll here about a corporate spring. We saw Khadafi fall, we saw Mubarak fall. When will we see the first corporate CEO fall?”
This really endears a company to executives, comparing the boardroom to oppressive Arab dictators.
9:33 am PT: “Facebook is eating the Web, and the Web is getting smaller now, and we’re trying to get our heads around it, and we’re seeing it in Arab Spring.” Facebook = fall of Khadafi = decline of Bill Gates = rise of humanitarianism.
9:35 am PT: “Are our enterprises social?” Are companies doing enough to bridge the social divide between human beings, who are using iPads, and executives who are stuck with PCs. “I believed this transformation is so important that we needed to look for a new answer.”
9:38 PT: It’s about the database. How tuned in are employees to all the networks that their clients belong to – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn? Are you keeping track of this? Do you know when your clients are tweeting?
9:43 am PT “Beware of the false cloud.” Complete with a fairly telling image. The perpetrator of the false cloud is Bill Gates, who Benioff says will try to convince you that you can put the cloud in Windows and put Windows in a phone.
9:45 am PT: “Delighting customers means knowing who they are and what they like,” citing Mark Zuckerberg.
Passes to the VP of Marketing.
Note the social network tags that appear under the contact’s name in this screenshot. This feature is being integrated into the Winter ’12 release of Salesforce.com.
Database.com Data Residency Option – lets you include data from your data center in your Salesforce.com. Benioff says this means key data that you don’t want to share in the cloud, may be housed locally instead. “Maybe you have a psychological issue with your CEO, or maybe there’s a government policy that you’re concerned about.” Now you can keep your own data in your data center.
9:53 am PT: Partner video now about Salesforce Chatter.
9:55 am PT: Chatter Now, adds presence and full instant messaging to the Chatter tab. Collaborate with live video on the dashboard or a document. “Integrating collaboration into your workflow.” Chatter Connect, adds a RESTful API for connectivity to “old-style connectivity applications like SharePoint and Lotus Notes.”
10:00 am PT: Demo of revised Chatter feature in Winter ’12 release “in just a couple of weeks,” says marketing head. Workflow approvals right inside Chatter, “the new user interface of Salesforce.”
Chatter groups can now include private employees plus customers, can exchange files between other chatterers. Benioff gets crowd reaction on the new feature from rock legend Neil Young.
Complete (or more complete) messaging application with mobile platform extensions.
10:12 am PT: Data.com. “You can now have access to all of this data, that was called Jigsaw and is now called Data.com.” No audible crowd response.
Forward movement in tablets is complemented by a huge shift in software, says Benioff. “That’s called HTML5. It’s as important as HTML was when it first came out.” Will give folks the ability to run apps on various devices but that are managed as services. “They’re running on your iPad, your iPhone, but they’re running in that service provider’s capability. Incredible! Amazing! Transformational! Of course, we were huge believers in HTML from the beginning. It’s a no-brainer to rapidly adopt. But by doing that, how you’re going to use Salesforce on these devices is going to change.”
Maybe using Safari today, but Salesforce would rather it be native. Touch.salesforce.com for native tablets, smartphone platforms. All customizations will also run natively.
Kraig Swensrud, CMO demonstrating what’s been added. Drilling through to deeper analytics. “Working your deals and closing these transactions.” “How do you map out an organization, and who are the key influencers? And how do you create the killer pitch?” Touch.salesforce.com: HTML5 app on the iPad, not an iPad-only app.
10:21 am PT:When data doesn’t appear in the customer profile from the Salesforce database, now the app can pull up customer data from Dun & Bradstreet Data.com. Audible, positive audience response this time.
Meetings built into Chatter directly now, complete with videoconferencing.
First partner on stage, Bob Toohey, president of Verizon Business. Benioff asks him, “Can you hear me now?”
Moving next to a customer profile of NBC Universal. Claiming 300% ROI after first week of deployment.
10:29 am PT: Benioff: Just a few years ago, Salesforce made the strategic decision to enter the customer service market. Support.zynga.com is now driven by Salesforce. New age companies like Zynga can inspire established firms like Bank of America. Go to Twitter.com/BofA/help for customer service worldwide. “These tweets are marked, ‘Via CRM.'” Indication that folks are using CRM to connect to customer service.
Scott comments: It’s interesting to note, we’re 90 minutes into the keynote and we’ve seen some profiles of partners and customers, but no third-party developers. The word “ecosystem” has not been heard here today.
10:41 am PT: Service Cloud functionality posts records of customer transactions to Facebook.
10:46 am PT: Service Cloud functionality enables direct link to Apple FaceTime.
The demo leads a customer through a temporary workaround process for a video cable on her projector.
10:49 am PT: A preview of the customer social profile being collected at the Salesforce booth, which is called the “campground.”
10:53 am PT: Co-founder of Salesforce Parker Harris shows the Touch.salesforce.com app on a giant, working iPad at the booth.
10:55 am PT: Heroku platform now adds Java development capability in addition to Ruby. Benioff gathers reaction to this news from M. C. Hammer. “The walls of fear are going down,” the Hammer says.
11:03 am PT: Radian6 platform (acquired recently by Salesforce) is being demonstrated with a Disney focus. There are dashboards and other tools that enable users to determine on a live basis who is discussing (tweeting, etc.) the customer’s brand, and where they’re discussing it, enabling them also to respond in real-time. Let me make this as clear as I can: “You can drill down into individual conversations. ‘Hey, I’m headed to Disneyland? What else should I check out?” And suddenly Disney can answer. Whatever you’re discussing in public becomes fodder for social profiles.
11:08 am PT: Benioff launches Product Social Networks with Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry. The main idea here appears to be, developing a fully branded customer outreach platform around brands. Later, Benioff addresses a “transformational” idea surrounding Toyotas – “How does a car become social? How can all of our cars become our friends?… How do we want to create a friend in all of our products?”
11:22 am PT: At last, the answer: A social network for the car. Yes, indeed, a page where the car communicates with you via the Web, via Facebook, or via Twitter. The car is communicating with its driver: Do I need gas? Do I need a tune-up? Did you remember to lock me?”
11:26 am PT: Here is a legitimate question from Benioff: He’s a friend of Coca-Cola on Facebook. And here’s a Coke machine that was probably built in the era before Facebook. How will I be able to communicate with this Coke machine, and how will this Coke machine communicate with me?
The solution to this dilemma lies in the data: to have a database recognize the geolocations of every Coke machine, no matter how old they are. That way, the user can be notified, when he comes into the vicinity of the old machine, of what loyalty points are available for various soft drinks. When the user redeems those points through the phone, he communicates with Coke the identity of what he’s drinking. And that’s a valuable piece of information that can be used. ‘Oh, you like Diet Coke! How well do you like it? Rate it on a scale of 1 to 5.’
Benioff: “This is what excites us, transforms us, ignites us!”