Cloudforce Boston

Wow

That pretty much sums up my thoughts on the Boston Cloudforce event put on by Salesforce.com. I'm actually pissed that we have been a salesforce.com customer since 2003 and I have never been. It's a great event and now one of two events I plan to make every year. The other is VMUG in Freeport, free all you can eat lobster and steak is hard to pass up.... Oh and they have presentations on VMWare too.

Now cloudforce didn't have free lobster, though it did have an open bar (though I don't drink so would have traded the beer and wine for a burger). It wasn't because Marc Benioff talked about how innovative Enterasys is for integrating social networking on network management. He did of course, but that wasn't why I thought it was so cool.

I was just super impressed how the whole salesforce.com team told the story of the "Social Revolution" and how cloud is passe now. I guess we have been talking about cloud for years now. Everything is social now. But they also showed how that helps.

The talked about "Toyota Friend" where you can friend your Toyota and get stats on everything about your car. WIsh VW had that for my Jetta TDI actually.

They showed a great video about KLM airline where they would use social networks to find people that were stuck in their terminal, and figure out what they would like for a gift and actualy deliver it. They called it KLM Surprise.

They showed a demonstration of a support person using facetime to, in real time, troubleshot an issue with a video conference unit, based on a facebook comment they saw.

Marc also talked about the three steps to become a social company. I ended up with about ten ideas I want to go do right away, including half a dozen new ISAAC ideas...

I did get a copy of "Behind the cloud" which is Marc Benniof explaining how salesforce.com came about. I'm only on page 50 but so far think this is my new favorite business book. If you ever get a chance to go to one of these events, do it...