Wave

• Dreamforce’s #1 marketing ploy is to let a company envision its future growth through cloud adoption. This has been driving Salesforce’s growth from a mere CRM software-on-the-web to the multi-billion vendor it is today.
  
  This year, Salesforce’s story is no longer just for sales, service and marketing departments to engage with their customers in a whole new way (its slogan to date). It goes much further.
  
  Ad Dreamforce 2014, enterprises can be looking forward to novel ways of interacting for all employees.
  
  
• The launch of Wave was big news at the Salesforce conference. Wave will provide easy-as-possible analytics for all users in an organization. It is to take analytics out of the ivory tower shared between the Statistics and IT departments and to put it in the hands of analytics users.
  
  
  It’s an enormous initiative. Many different types of users; many different data sources. Data does not automatically line up, usually. Delivering powerful insights can only be arrived at with correct data alignment. How?
  
  In typical trailblazing manner, Salesforce is paving the road for more timely and mobile-available reporting and analytics than every before. New territory for all. … [Read More about Wave…], or continue with this article.
  
  

• At Dreamforce, Salesforce also announced Salesforce1 Lightning, a way to build mobile apps at lightning speed. Lightning puts the ability to make apps in the hands of employees. Like for Wave, Salesforce has a grand vision for Lightning.

  Highlights:

  Easy to use: By creating re-usable components, employees can enjoy a drag/drop method to quickly build the apps they want. They can make them look/feel exactly as they need. Contrast that with the alternative: apps are coded by developers, who may or may not understand end-users needs, nor be able to deliver apps as timely as needed.
  
  Roll-out: Initially Lightning is intended for Salesforce’s larger enterprise customers, albeit that a roll-out to the SME-market is envisioned also.
  
  Mobile on Any Device: With Lightning, developers and business users can now create purpose-built apps for devices with screens of every shape and size—desktops, laptops, tablets, phablets, smartphones and wearables. Lightning delivers a consistent, modern user experience across every Salesforce app.

• Changing the IT Role: Through these initiatives, Salesforce revolutionizes the role of the IT division even further from ‘IT-owners and -creators’ to ‘IT-development leaders and -coaches’.

• Efficiency: Lightning is using an interesting form of crowd-sourcing. As developers and end-users create apps for their specific business solutions, Lightning collects their reusable app components in a growing library to be shared with all users.
• Fueling Growth: The app industry is already booming today. Lightning can fuel a tremendous growth in the app industry. In 2013, 80 billion apps were downloaded. That number is expected to grow to 160 billion by 2017, according to eMarketer. I think that is a gross understatement.
  
  

  It is probably more to 8 –9 times 160 billion in 2017. With Salesforce’s revolutionary idea, Lightning, a new era of Platform as a Service (PaaS) begins. Thanks to ideas like this, the apps growth curve is more likely to spiral out rather than following a tidy compound growth rate on a two-dimensional chart.
  
  Salesforce being at the epicenter of apps, it’s bound to convince business that mobile apps will be imperative for success.

Those two announcements, Wave and Lightning, are the most important takeaways from Dreamforce 2014. That is, besides the announcement of Salesforce’s collaboration with Microsoft, offering MS Office on its PAAS. An important step towards integration in the (cloud) business software industry… [Read More about Microsoft Integration …], or continue with this article.

Beyond these two product launches (and hundreds of technical product-related upgrades), there were three noteworthy business social trends observed at Dreamforce 2014. They are part of what makes Salesforce a leader.

More Power at Dreamforce

• Power of women

  It’s time to ensure women take some chairs around the boardroom table when technology and business decision making are to be made. Salesforce emphasizes that notion more strongly each year.

  This year, Dreamforce hosted several initiatives empowering women in tech. Salesforce honors female leaders. Hillary Clinton rather than Bill was invited as visionary speaker. Salesforce two most powerful positions in marketing are filled by women. Just a few of many examples of how Salesforce nurtures women power.

• Power of sound

  Invited as keynote speaker, music industry maven Neil Young shared the stage with and supported Al Gore who spoke on climate change.  Young knows like none else that repeated words in music bring about emotional and mental shifts ~ those required to make a social vision a reality.

  
  Young also announced his new digital music device and downloading service, called Pono, Hawaiian for well-being and accuracy. Pono technology is to meant to play music the way it sounds live.

  Earlier, Musician Will.I.Am from the Black Eyed Peas launched Puls, a fashionable smart cuff that takes calls and sends text without a mobile. Read: .. tweet with a guitar or a cocktail in your hands.