Dreamforce Day 2 Keynote force.com platform announcements
9:20 Marc Benioff has just taken the stage – quite a showman he is. Nice video overview of day 1. Benioff now talking about Microsoft as the evil empire – says they are trying to stop chatter, the sales cloud, and his new socks. Talking now about the Microsoft lawsuit – and Micosoft “protest” outside yesterday. (MS had seqway drivers out front with “Don get Forced” slogans.)
Benioff asks the crowd to help him get this customer back and ask Bernard to come on out… Its the guy in the MS advertisements – on the trucks and seqways. “Bernard I’m so sorry…. we want to apologize to you” “We don’t want you to go back to software, the constant upgrades, waiting for new features…” Crowd applauds and Bernard says he will come back. Classic Benioff.
9:38 Benioff now talking about his donation of $100M for a children’s hospital at UCSF. Describing all the investment in a new campus at Mission Bay. Today is UCSF day at Dreamforce. Working to raise $1.5B for the new hospital. Still waiting for the force.com announcements.
9:52 here we go with the meat of the keynote – “your platform is too proprietary” Benioff wants to open the platform further. Adding Ruby on Rails support. “Ruby is the true language of cloud 2” (talking about speed and agility of using the language). Salesforce buying Heroku! Wow.
Heroku will be salesforce’s seventh cloud. Will keep Heroku as an independent team. Heroku founded in 2007 to enable fast deployment/updgrade/delivery of Ruby apps. Fancy d- emo, but no details on how this will integrate with force.com yet.
Eighth cloud announcement: BMC Software – CEO Bob Beauchamp on stage now. Announcing Remdyforce now available on salesforce.com, IT configuration management.
Platform team announcements – “force.com 2” -going to build a killer product for each market:
appforce – departmental and collaborative applications. looks like a marketing repackaging of what force.com already provides. don’t see anything new here. Improvements to sharing – new sharing model to be delivered in the Spring. Configurable Visualforce pages, Reduce governor limits by 70% in Spring.
siteforce – integrated cms, point and click editor, prebuilt components, social and mobile built in, 24×7 availability. Killer UI on the new CMS for content creation and publishing.
vmforce – accenture on stage talking about vmforce. Accenture is investing in vmforce – I don’t see anything really new here and the whole thing feels like a little bit of a false start. With the new acquisition of Heroku, I would be dubious of a large investment in vmforce.
isvforce – packaged apps on the appexchange – more marketecture. Didn’t see anything new here.
Now have CEO and CIOs on stage from Blackboard, Belkin, Avon, Kelly Services, and Deloitte talking about how the platform has helped them.
that’s a wrap.