Smart SaaS

Dreamforce conference was a Cloud tour de force for Salesforce.com with 90,000 attendees, which more than doubled last year’s numbers  and more than 350 companies in their  cloud exposition.

No Cloud Convincing Needed

Marc Benioff was definitely preaching to the Cloud choir.  No one at the conference had to be convinced the Cloud is the future anymore, because extensive use of the Cloud is here today.  The opening keynote included a video that was full of customer Cloud use cases including many from last year.  Many of these companies are very large, like General Electric and Virgin Group, while many others are innovative mid sized firms like Men’s Warehouse, Rossingnol and many others.  It’s now about how companies are transforming their businesses using the Cloud.

New Lines of Business

Salesforce announced their be Social Marketing Cloud which is the combination of the Radian6 and BuddyMedia acquisitions, that opens up a new buying community for the company – Chief Marketing Officers.   The brief glimpse we got of the new product was impressive and meets a different need that traditional marketing automation providers are delivering.  If I was an executive at Hubspot I might be getting a little nervous.

The next business line had be anticipated since last years Rypple acquisition which is Salesforce’s new social performance management platform, Work.com. The offering was a very limited performance management product and it looked more like a gamified rewards platform for sales teams, rather than a full-fledged HR product.

This is Salesforce’s first foray into HR and they may be taking a more measured approach to HR applications and trying to tie them more closely to their own Sales and Service Cloud application. The Work.com offering provides for goals management, coaching There are several native HR Force.com applications including JobScience and Vana Workforce that could be future acquisitions to aid in building out an HR suite.  This is sure to be an area of Salesforce’s product strategy to keep an eye on over the next few years, especially with the upcoming Workday IPO.

The last line of business appears to be a small effort around a online project management tool, Do.com.  This looks a lot like a young Asana. Not sure how this product offering fits into the overall Salesforce strategy but this might be a company within a company that is testing some early concepts. Do.com joins Work.com and Desk.com as small mini-brands targeting the SMB or SOHO buyers with their own.  Check out their websites, they are positioned as their own companies and it should be interesting to see how they interact with Salesforce over time.

Other Announcements and Links

Dreamforce 2012 was a really impressive event and showcased a strong eco-system with more than 300 exhibitors, some of them paying up to $1 million for prime exhibit space but there were several other important announcements as well:

• Salesforce Chatterbox.  This new product delivers simple and secure file sharing across devices in the enterprise. With Salesforce Chatterbox, users will be able to manage and share files in the context of business inside of a trusted environment.
• Salesforce Identity. The new Salesforce Identity will deliver “Facebook-like identity for the enterprise,” a single, social, trusted identity service to access and centrally manage every cloud app within Salesforce.