Dreamforce 11 Here I come.

I am very excited to be speaking at what has to be one of the coolest events this year, Salesforce.com's Dreamforce. Not only are there tons of great executives speaking and sharing their experiences, great events like Metallica playing a concert for everyone and Mark Benioff presenting the Social Enterprise but it's also in San Francisco which is one of those cities I've been meaning to see.

I'm presenting with two excellent experts, Andrea Lazaru from Salesforce.com and Dave McDermott from Kelly Services. Kelly Services places a new employee once every 60 seconds and with today's unemployment, a good name to keep in mind.... Just saying.

We are talking about "Using Chatter to transform your business." We are one of the first sessions of Dreamforce kicking off at 2:00PM on Tuesday, if you are at Dreamforce stop by. Vala Afshar has already pointed out his session has more registered users and while I'm not competitive I'd like to make sure he at least has to work to beat me. Dan Petlon and Ben Doyle, my esteemed IT colleagues, are also speaking at various sessions so we are definitely going to be heard.

A few people have pointed out that I, being the infrastructure guy, must feel like a lamb being led to slaughter at a cloud event. Cloud people and infrastructure people historically haven't seen eye to eye. Enterasys uses chatter a lot, have seen big though subtle changes in our company and are also driving a huge change in the way networks are managed and run using tools like, Enterasys Network’s own Isaac.

For us Chatter, and social media in general, are transforming not just the way we run our business, and interact with customers and partners, but really transforming our entire industry. In five years will network managers really need to learn cryptic CLI commands on individual devices, when they can simply talk in natural language to their network as a system?

Chatter really helps transform how we can communicate to not just other people but to anything. Smart devices like networks, vehicles like Toyota and smart appliances should be able to interact with us. Humans are social creatures, at Enterasys we are learning how to make our networks socially aware so that they can communicate with us on our level. That’s how we are getting ready for Dreamforce11 and the future!