Assessing Cloudforce 2010, Including the Keynote Presentation

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Salesforce.com, arguably the most skilled event marketers in the Cloud Computing market, hosted CloudForce 2010 on June 22 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, Calif.  The slides Founder and CEO Marc Benioff are below – they are worth checking out and seeing how quickly this SaaS vendor is attempting to redefine the markets they compete in, and create new ones as well.

Salesforce.com Sees Events as Catalysts of Trust

Salesforce.com executives have long stated that event marketing makes their applications real, and further strengthens a core value of the company, which is building and sustaining customer trust.  They are clearly the most traveled software company in the industry, hosting thousands of events a year globally – all in the pursuit of the goal of being more trusted by users and developers alike.
Salesforce.com also realizes that to gain and keep developer trust they have to over-compensate in terms of authenticity, honesty and transparency of product direction and strategy – all areas where developers have in the past been burned by software companies looking to scale into the enterprise.  Oracle’s on-again, off-again relationship with developers is a case in point.

Cloud2 and the Future of Social CRM
You have to admire companies who can quickly sense a market opportunity and launch products to capitalize on them.  Salesforce.com is doing exactly that with Cloud2.  Capitalizing on real-time integration to mobile, hand-held and tablet devices while streamlining apps with HTML5 puts the Cloud2 initiative right in the middle of Social CRM and the use of Chatter as a collaborative platform capable of scaling from workgroups to entire organizations.  Chatter is being positioned by Salesforce.com as Facebook for the enterprise.   Given the lack of solid direction on privacy and user controls at Facebook, Salesforce.com has a fighting chance with this market position.

Bottom line: Relying on the Force.com as the development platform, Chatter will be scalable across the Salesforce.com customer base immediately.  Expect to see Chatter and its development community find innovative uses of this technology in selling, marketing automation, lead generation and service.

Disclaimer: Salesforce.com did not compensate me to write this blog entry or cover the event.