Marc Benioff likes to talk about how salesforce is "democratizing" technology by making large enterprise class IT infrastructure and application management affordable for even the smallest companies.
But at Dreamforce this week, I saw a much wider view of his democracy.
At one end of the table was a ball of color - bob of red hair, purple trousers - D.A. of the indie band Chester French. At the other end was Joe Drouin, CEO of Kelly Services which places 650,000 contract staff around the world, in a dark suit and white shirt. Quite a contrast in size of customer and dress code.
There was Avon which showed off how it leverages force.com and Facebook as it targets its Mark product line at a younger generation of customer. And there Bob Beuachamp, CEO of BMC which has made billions over the last 3 decades selling mainframe and other IT centric tools telling the audience that he had heard from a CIO "I have 30,000 servers and I hate them all"
There was appirio showing off salesforce's new Chatter features integrated with Google Apps. A few minutes later there was Accenture showing off a much more traditional set of survey screens.
There was Astadia, a new-gen systems integrator as Platinum Sponsor on the expo floor. And there was Deloitte, also a Platinum sponsor.
There was Gavin Newsom, the young, left-leaning mayor of San Francisco and there was Gen. Colin Powell, the right-leaning former US Secretary of State.
The show had 19,000 attendees registered from more than 60 countries...quite a rainbow.
Hey, this democracy thing may actually have some legs...
