Come to the Cloud: Dreamforce

The Salesforce platform is starting to fill out into a stack that is a credible threat to other enterprise players well beyond their core sales roots. The Dreamforce event has been very accessible online - I spent a couple of hours at San Francisco's Moscone Center earlier this week and have been keeping an eye on proceedings online for the rest of the event as I work.

Charismatic CEO Marc Benioff has spent a considerable amount of time onstage extolling the virtues of 'no software' to a large live audience both from stage and wandering amongst them, creating an evangelical feel heightened by frequent use of the word 'change' which also evoked recent US political rallies. The actual vendor exhibition floor at Dreamforce was comprised of many mostly small booths - there's no question Salesforce and its various url titled product lines are the big dog - and the offerings were mostly add-ons and training type products to complement the Benioff ecosphere.

The Billy Graham rally like fervor did include introductions to happy reference customers, but one sensed the crowd was largely comprised of folks hoping to profit from a changing of the guard from the old vendor players to the on demand platforms of the enterprise scale Salesforce offerings. Benioff wasn't promising them a path to eternal life but rather sanctity and security for data within a flexible kingdom that will serve future generations of enterprises within a cloudy sky around the nucleus of the planet Salesforce.

To get to this promised land you must renounce your old ways - beware the false cloud! - and cross the chasm to embrace and adopt the new way in order to revolutionize your ways to communicate and collaborate. Enterprise customers running critical infrastructure have heard this type of siren song before of course, and got themselves and their data locked into long term relationships that have since lost their luster.

Another analogy aside from the evangelical one that kept popping into my head while I was on site was mini storage units - the rent by the month units  that have sprung up everywhere in North America, and which are doing big business as a result of the credit crisis and subsequent house repossessions. Although Salesforce have ninety thousand customers that's a drop in the ocean compared to the old testament of enterprise computing - on premise cathedrals of legacy technologies.

Fundamentally this is all about where to keep your stuff - in the olden days you had to have a building, lights & power to store it all, provision pricey software to make your stuff accessible and to manipulate it with, and people available to keep it all up and running.

There are vast numbers of people on the planet as you read this running systems that were installed in pre internet days - SAP for example are committed to continued support for legacy systems, which are often accessed by newer technologies. 'It might not be pretty but it's paid for' might be the sticker on these types of solutions, especially in comparison to the 'per seat per month' costs of 'no software' cloud licenses.

A sad aspect of the US housing credit and repossession crisis are the regular storage unit auctions and lien sales to vacate non-paying tenants possessions - when the collection plate comes round at the church of the cloud, those souls who can't meet their offertory obligations may similarly find their data to be inaccessible to them.

As Moore's Law seems to also apply to the sheer volume of stuff enterprises generate, doubling every few months in some cases, the buy side end user grapples with the same core problem of where to put it all and how to manipulate it. The glamor of the possibilities afforded by new technologies has to be balanced with ensuring they provide a viable foundation and home against all the excitement around

Digital disruption. Social media. Real-time collaboration. Data convergence. Virtual teams. Agile development. Mobile everything. Cloud computing. The way we work is fundamentally changing. Some companies will adapt and grow. Others will be left behind.

To quote Dreamforce's marketing proposition verbage...