Clouds and the chattering classes of the 21st century, chattering away on technology in the second decade at Cloudforce, live on the web or on-premises (old fashion conference attendees). We all got to hear about the new products and strategies from Salesforce.com.
I loved the multi-media approach. Web, tweeting (mostly whiners, though) and great speakers from Apple, Dell, Motorola, and VMware were kick-off presenters, as well as Marc Benioff sharing information and some cloudy humor. Marc talked about the cloud market and the confusion in the market as everyone jumps on the cloud buzz word with his ‘Beware of the false clouds … ’ (Understanding cloud applications and cloud platforms.)
More interesting was his Cloud 1 vs. Cloud 2 concept. In other words, from web and its low cost advantage and charter — good — to a truly networked application, for social and business collaborations and sharing, on-demand — great.
Our spin on Salesforce was that it was more hosted-enterprise solutions. On-demand yes, but not really cloud, since it was missing the ‘shared’ characteristic. But then along comes Chatter!
Chatter is the new ‘state of being’ for Salesforce. It is hard to call it a product. The UI is modeled after a facebook, LinkedIn approach (yawn). But Chatter is social network, Lead Gen/Demand Gen application, SharePoint all wrapped into one! A networked philosophy, and integrative approach that brings people, applications, media, together over any platform, desktop or mobile, over any browser. Now I get excited.
Very very clever, leveraging Safesforce.com, their Jigsaw acquisition and other applications, to create a truly integrated environment … which points to the fact that Salesforce actually knows what they are doing! Any browser any handheld.And Benioff then announced some of those partners.
Keynote guests included:
- Michael Tchao, VP of development of Apple, responsible for the iPad. He very proudly announces that Apple has already sold 3 million iPads! And Of course, it has Chatter on it.
- Moto, talking about that corporate strategy and mobile strategy.
- Dell too, and please notice them, have an Android mobile device coming out; not sure about the cool factor, based on what was shown, but they will be there.
And now for the Salesforce world domination play: Paul Moritz (right), CEO of VMware, was a key guest and talked about the partnership with Salesforce and Google providing developers to platform and tools to convert their java code … .. to the cloud. What else?
This is a super move for Paul Moritz, the ex Microsoft exec, who keeps his eye on the goal and knows a bit himself about world domination strategies.
See all that code in the cloud! Wonder who will host it all? Return on the large account hardware sales!
This article is part of our ongoing Cloud Series – our effort to bring clarity to cloud services and technologies.
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