Every few years I go to a tech campus or event where you can can just sense the optimism to well, change the world. I felt it at a SAP conference in mid 90s. I felt it at the Infosys campus earlier this decade. I got the same vibe from Dreamforce this week.
Charlie Bell of amazon Web Services ( a new partner salesforce introduced at the conference) called the event Woodstock. There was rock-n-roll (though Neil Young showed up with his new electric Linc Volt not his guitar). There was plenty of love ( a "love continuum" is how a salesforce exec described how they treat their growing armies of partners). And there was mind-altering stuff ( 4+ hours of high-energy, high-entertainment Marc Benioff in his key note and then a press q&a).
But above all there was confidence. The confidence which comes from being able to promise new customer websites at a small fraction of provisioning time and cost incumbent vendors and IT deliver at. The confidence which comes from high-availability which blows away SLAs even large outsourcers provide to individual customers. The confidence which comes from having been hardened by hundreds of due diligence visits from some of the most sophisticated security and business continuity teams of its customers.
And plenty of of youthful exuberance. Marc saying his 3 data centers should do him fine for several more years even as he and his ecosystem try to replace applications and infrastructure at customers who have over 200,000 data centers of their own. Proudly introducing ISVs like Coda and Glovia as "native" as they used the Force.com platform to SaaS-ify their applications - even as the term "native" morphs as salesforce exposes its customers to amazon and other clouds, and social networks and developer communities like Facebook. Focus on these innovations while customers were asking "when are we going to hear about the boring CRM stuff we paid for?"
But I nitpick.
As I left the conference this afternoon a street vendor at 4th and Howard was doing brisk business selling Obama t-shirts. At prices higher than those for the nice Tommy Bahama shirts salesforce gifted the conference attendees:)
I have a feeling for the next few years, one of the few brisk business areas in tech will revolve around Marc.
Change is in the air. Peace, dudes!
