Archive for the ‘Events’ Category
Dreamforce 2010 – A Newcomer Perspective
In early December I had the chance to attend Dreamforce 2010. Not having been to salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event before, I really didn’t know what to expect. I’ve been to plenty of big trade shows in the past, including COMDEX in Las Vegas back in it’s heyday, and Oracle OpenWorld which fills every hotel in San Francisco.
Somehow I was expecting more hubris and fanfare from this event and I wasn’t really disappointed. 30,000ish attendees was a huge uptick from 20,000ish attendees the year prior. That much growth in interest for the platform is staggering. I’m no analyst but I think this year’s record profits will not stay the high water mark for long. Mark Benioff was entertaining and his potshots at Oracle and Microsoft were predictable and pretty funny. He sounded a lot like his former mentor Larry, even when poking at Larry.
The conference is everything Cloud, with some exhibitors having nothing to do with salesforce.com or force.com, simply being cloud was enough. Even the plastic show badges were shaped like clouds. GreatVines had a nice presence for our size, as we were featured at a press event, Jim demo’ed the Craft Brewers Alliance version of HopVines, and Tim was on the closed circuit TV with Scott from CBA.
The big announcements from salesforce.com were interesting and of high potential impact to salesforce.com. They continue to expand on their platform as a service offerings, by bundling development and database tools to allow partners like us to continue expanding our offerings.
One announcement we had hoped for was the hinted at improvements to the bundled analytics platform within force.com, but we will all have to wait a bit longer it seems. Watch this space….
Overall, a great time and a good opportunity for us to bond as an ever growing team, we had 4 of our 6 full time employees present (watch this space also).
Oh, and congratulations to our own Jeff Huth, who passed the onsite Developer Exam and is now certified. There is a rumor that he got the highest score ever taken on the exam, not sure we will ever know.
John Collins, CEO
GreatVines LLC
GreatVines and Craft Brewers Alliance at Dreamforce
During Dreamforce 2010, our own Tim Jones got the chance to visit with Sarah Franklin from salesforce.com and Scott Schaeffer from Craft Brewers Alliance to discuss their use of the GreatVines Sales Management application on the Force.com platform.
GreatVines to Sponsor 67th WSWA in Las Vegas
Come visit GreatVines at the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers Association 67th Annual Convention and Exposition in early April 2010. We will be in Booth 507 demonstrating our cutting-edge solutions for Sales Management and Order entry, Supplier Portal Reporting and much more! Hope to meet you there!
Thoughts on Dreamforce 2009
As my fourth year at Dreamforce wraps up, I continue to be overwhelmed by the strength of the cloud computing movement. This conference, once a meeting ground for like-minded anti-software junkies and Salesforce.com admins, has become the confluence of energy and change in the application technology space. Every keynote, presentation, luncheon and networking event was overflowing with people anxious to see the bleeding edge of this already leading edge technology.
We were thankful to present our GreatVines customer ranking and segmentation engine, just one component of our Direct-to-Consumer marketing module, to a few hundred interested partners and fellow developers. Our submission in the Force.com 40 Innovation Showcase this year garnered a runner-up placement and a short 7 minute demo slot. Here are other memorable items from the conference:
- Salesforce Chatter – a bold new concept in which the best of Facebook and Twitter, from the consumer web, are brought into the Enterprise software world. Imagine knowing as much about your data and your team, as you do all your friends on Facebook! I think it is brilliant of Salesforce to so quickly identify this massive user experience trend and incorporate it into their core platform.
- The Salesforce Report Wizard will change with Spring 2010 to become a single-step left-panel interface, which previews with live data! This will greatly enhance the reporting capabilities on the core platform and allow our customers to adapt to report training and modification much faster.
- Salesforce Content is now free! This is great news for the entire Salesforce and Force.com community, including our 3-tier and wholesale customers. Contact us to find out more about how you can begin leveraging this amazing capability right away.
- Congratulations to Jason Ouellette who won the Developer Hero award. Jason is a friend of GreatVines and Rogue IT who recently published the definitive book on Force.com development.
We expected an announcement on new Portal User pricing, which is part of our wine club module (login, logout, update contact information, review orders) but will now wait until after their Fiscal 2010 closes in January.
Stay tuned to this website for the latest updates on Force.com, GreatVines, and how this technology can be best adapted to the Wine and Spirits industry. Please subscribe to our updates at the top of the page if you would like email notifications of new content.
