9:58 – U2 playing, pretty crowded. Looks like a mini-Dreamforce. Lights dimming…
10:06 I’m sure you won’t be able to see Benioff since the iPhone camera sucks, but I’ll do my best.
10:11 2 Powerbooks on stage. Nice.
10:15 Here we go.
We have an exciting day for you. Presentation, discussion with Morgan Stanley, new stuff from CODA, SFDC vision of the future. Then Nick Carr – “Why IT doesn’t matter.”
Safe Harbor, blah blah.
SF Mission is to create the SaaS market. Moving from client-server to cloud computing. Moving from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft to new vendors.
Talking about multi-tenancy, sharing with other customers. Huge shift for industry and basis of SaaS. Subscription model, pay-as-you-go, like a magazine, cell phone, cable model.
Multi-tenancy can support very large companies to very small companies (big banks to public schools). Very scalable, 150 million transactions daily. Nice hockey stick graph showing transactions and page load time over several years.
Old way of writing software: 5.25″ floppy, send to a store, hope to meet someone years later who uses the product.
New way: immediate feedback and reaction time. Development cycle to change product is now 90 days (3-4 releases per year), 25 releases in 8 years.
Industry recognitions: Forbes, Gartner, Business Week, Fortune, etc etc etc.
Salesforce.com Foundation. [Editor: Yay!] When we started, 1% time,1% equity ,1% product, model. 16 employees. 501c3, 16 schools using SFDC. 3,000 Nonprofits using it. $12 million grants. NY public schools got a $100,000 grant – applause.
Going for the first $1 Billion SaaS company. 1.1 million subscrbers, 40,000 companies.
Google Apps + SF Integration – “your business in the cloud”. Currently free for standard Google Apps, enterprise version from SF for $10/user/mo.
Strategy: Force.com is the Platform as a Service. Visualforce in production within 90 days. (Editor: That’s news…coming with Summer 08 perhaps?)
Showing Microsoft’s .net being built on a house of “server/database/etc” cards. Emerging countries can’t afford all the infrastructure.
Which path will you choose: Software or Cloud Computing?
Force.com is Salesforce’s cloud computing offering. Low cost, easy to use, low risk.
[Taking a break from liveblogging the sales pitch/architecture - will resume when I hear something nonprofit-y.]
Bringing up Dan Marionni from Morgan Stanley. Will note anything NPO-ish.
Bringing up Narinder Singh from Appirio. Demo-ing Dolby, their customer. VERY cool live instance using Visualforce. Doesn’t look anything like Salesforce, but is.
Bringing up Jeremy Roche from CODA, a UK finance applications shop. A general ledger accounting app built on SFDC. Pretty neat.
Adam Gross from Salesforce is now creating an App, “Cooking Show style”. Using Eclipse and Visualforce. Getting started: https://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Getting_Started
Nick Carr talking about “the big switch” to the cloud.
[Battery running low, so going to sign off here. Hope you all enjoyed this.]
One more little bonus for you – me and Lisa Glass with GIANT STEVE:
