What HfS Saw of Note at Dreamforce ’15

Dreamforce ’15—with its promotion, substance, crowds and parties—has now come and past and so the time has come to take stock of it all and what we saw of note over four days in San Francisco. The HfS focus for Dreamforce was really to see how Salesforce was addressing major industry trends such as automation and IoT as well as how service providers were being shaped by the Salesforce platform announcements.

Going into Dreamforce, HfS had identified four areas we wanted to track during the event. The first was the emergence of new vertical solutions. The second was the integration of IoT into Salesforce products. The third the emergence of new automation tools and methodologies for Salesforce delivered processes and the last was new uses cases for Force.com platforms. Overall, we saw much of interest for the first two of these areas and not as much on the others.

Dreamforce began with a scramble as we digested the implications of Accenture’s acquisition of Cloud Sherpas. That there is a scramble amongst Salesforce service providers to obtain and retain talent to meet continued growth across the ever expanding breadth of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform (sales, service, marketing, community, analytics, apps and IoT) was reinforced both as we talked to clients and to other service providers on the Dreamforce exhibit halls and during the Salesforce partner keynote as it was announced that the notoriously difficult Architect Academy certification was being broken up into 9 specialist tracks (e.g., Application Architecture and Apex & Visualforce).

Walking the floors of the Moscone Center we watched demonstrations of most of the 38 FullForce industry solutions that are in the market today but overall the theme of the event was much more horizontal than we had anticipated. While there were many great enterprise specific demonstrations such as for Mattel, Design Within Reach, Philips, Barclays and Merck in particular, it was the horizontal applications such as Apptus, FinancialForce.Com and Sage, which were more visible. Our one-on-ones with service providers left us with the feeling that broader vertical solution investments were still taking a backseat for the next year as well.

Even more underplayed than verticals was any discussion of building greater process automation in the enterprise around Salesforce solutions. Where this was center stage at SAP SuccessFactors, we really only found Bluewolf putting automation in the form of their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) capabilities up front in their booth and analyst discussions. Our reference client discussions for the forthcoming Salesforce Blueprint have highlighted that enterprises still run inefficient processes around Salesforce and so we expect to see more on automation solutions in the year ahead.

What we did see though was the start of a future focus on IoT integration into the Salesforce ecosystem. Salesforce kicked this off with the introduction of the IoT Cloud platform which while likely a year or so from being more substantive in its capabilities was still a good signal of the importance that Salesforce was putting on IoT data integration. We also saw numerous demos of initial IoT integration on the floor of the Trailhead Developer’s Zone and in presentations from the likes of Capgemini and other service providers. We believe that Dreamforce ’16 will be the moment when IoT integration becomes much more substantive but the initial directions were encouraging.

Perhaps the most encouraging development of the event was the pervasiveness of the recently announced new Salesforce UI – Lightning. By addressing a standing criticism that the user interface wasn’t flexible and featured enough to meet evolving customer expectations, Salesforce was able to capture the hearts of the system admins and developers at the event in whose hands the success of the current deployments (and their ongoing license revenue) rests which after all is one of the primary purposes behind Dreamforce anyways.

Overall, Dreamforce helped position Salesforce more broadly across enterprise processes and helped highlight the ongoing transition towards the As-a-Service Economy.

However, as the Salesforce Customer Success Platform has become larger and more complex this year, the key take-away of Dreamforce ’15 is that service providers and enterprises are scrambling to get the talent to keep up and bring the whole ecosystem to reality.