Its been well close to a month since the grand event that was Dreamforce 2013 in San Francisco has ended. I really wanted to let a bit more time pass to allow everyone including myself to absorb all the great keynotes, presentations and after parties that took place last month. Below are a few closing comments on the conference. Feel free to reply or add your take, would appreciate it.

With this being my 5^th Dreamforce, I think it would be safe to say this was the largest gathering of customers, vendors, SI’s that I have seen assembled in and around the Mascone Center.  As last year, there was a lot of overflow to many large hotels, which made the conference lose some of its ‘’gathering effect” since a lot of us were so spread out. Nevertheless, it was a great conference and below are some of my key take aways from #DF13 this year.

• We learned products such as our toothbrushes will be able to report back to our dentist  if we are brushing or not. Basically, most devices in the future will be connected to the cloud, reporting data, issues and talking with a more connected world. This will be a huge step in the goal of living in a truly connected work. Imagine a world in which your products can talk to you and let you know when they are down, need attention and report trends in real time. This is coming and Dreamforce showed us how. I was most excited to think about the fact that this the data provided from a truly connect world will allow us to mine and gather data as we never have in the past.

• Secondly, the people and conversation had were just incredible. I was able to meet with some really smart, innovative and curious people from all over the world across so many different industries. Overall, the big enterprise companies I see are really moving to the SFDC platform, which I think surprised me the most. For the longest time, the larger enterprise companies were not there or just not bought into the power of the platform and cloud. These are massive projects that will go over several years, but with SFDC, they can move quicker. I see a need in the marketplace for experienced resources who know how to manage, work and run large complex global projects to get the full benefit of the cloud platform that is Salesforce.com. As you know, SFDC is more than just CRM and can allow your company to move quicker to take advantage of the features and functions. Although Salesforce.com puts on a great show and the products and keynotes are amazing, it’s the people that drive the stories of Dreamforce.

• Salesforce1 without a doubt was the big  topic this year at Dreamforce. I think the bringing together the entire package of mobile, desktop and everything else under one umbrella is the right call.  One message, Saleforce mentioned a lot was that Salesforce1 was and is built on the  ‘API First’ approach. With this approach, Saleforce is attempting to bring all mobile devices together. Essentially Salesforce is attempting to build out a marketplace in which ISV and companies can build out their own applications for their needs. All of course built on the cloud platform and force.com. The idea of a company or even end user building out their own mobile device applications to run their operations and business is both exciting and scary at the same time. Marc Benioff even brought Meg Whitman (CEO HP) on stage for one key note to discuss HP’s effort to print to the cloud. Gone are the days of having to print with those huge serial printer cables of the past.  Personally, I like the idea of SFDC admin’s being able to monitor and control their SFDC instance from their mobile device. Imagine now, deploying the release from your mobile device before heading in to go see a movie on the weekend.

Overall, I left the Dreamforce excited, energized and ready to take on the new set of project, products and world that is Salesforce.

On a someone related note here are the links to my 3 sessions I presented on and the subject of those presentations.

• Chatter: Rockstar Roll-outs

• “Wow” Your Channel: Improving Partner Engagement & Adoption

•  How to Manage Large Data Volumes

Hector Perez

• Tags: Dreamforce, Salesforce, SFDC