You can like It, love it, hate it but you can’t ignore it- that’s Dreamforce for you. One of the largest software conferences in the world. As it goes every year, this year too was no different with 170,000 attendees at the event and complete take-over of Moscone center with every restaurant, coffee shop, bar, hotel booked for/by Dreamforce.
There were monks delivering Mindfulness sessions, cycle rickshaws taking attendees, guides at every nook and corner and of course the city cops controlling the surge of people on roads!
To the veterans attending Dreamforce every year, this year was “Drama free”, though to be fair it wasn’t content free. There are two words that dominate Dreamforce lexicon. The first is Trailblazer, the second is innovation.
Marc Benioff’s keynote emphasized 4th Industry revolution which is going to be shaped by Trailblazers. With Digital and Physical worlds boundaries blurring, the “Intelligence Revolution” is going to be the driving force.
A Pertinent question which all of us have but not really spelled out is: Is Technology dividing or Uniting us? And as we find the right answer to this, it is more evident that smarter, more personalized digital experiences that place the customer at the center of their business are becoming prominent.
The big announcement this Dreamforce was about the new BFFs in Cloud- Salesforce and Google.
Describing their new partnership as a natural fit, Salesforce and Google announced plans to integrate their services for “smarter, more collaborative experiences.” As part of the deal, unveiled during the first day of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Google Cloud will become the preferred cloud services provider for Salesforce, while Salesforce will integrate Google’s G Suite productivity services into its own customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
There wasn’t any new cloud announced but lot of updates on the existing platform which includes –
Quip Collaboration Platform
The new platform enables businesses to create and work on documents that can include real-time data through the use of embedded applications called Live Apps. Among the data sources supported by Live Apps are Salesforce records, calendars, and kanban boards.
myTrailhead for Gamified Training
The new platform includes a Trail Maker guided setup tool, a Trailhead Profile to provide a complete view of each employee’s skills and training record, a Trail Mixer tool for creating customized learning packages with content from multiple sources, a Trail Tracker app for motivating employees with gamified leaderboards, and Trail Checker for designing interactive challenges with quizzes, stand-and-deliver assessment tools, and more.
Others include myEinstein, myIOT, mySalesforce, myLightning.
With what I could take away from the sessions is CommerceCloud is going to be more and more important for us on Salesforce to know. It’s not an easy time to be a retailer. Consumers expect digital experiences, and they don’t care that retailers are hamstrung with outdated systems that can’t connect to each other or move fast. Especially when digital-native newcomers are setting the pace in presenting a unified retail experience without the same legacy holding them back.
Commerce Cloud roadmap announcement featuring integration with marketing cloud and service cloud just highlights the pivotal focus Salesforce has on this product
Overall a wonderful event with the message of 1:1:1 conveyed strongly with more than 2.3M volunteer hours, 170M grants and free products for 32K non-profits!
