Dreamforce 2017 - Highlights from the worlds biggest tech conference.
I’ve just got back from the craziest tech conference on the planet, Dreamforce.
Since becoming a Salesforce customer, attending Dreamforce has been high on my priority list after countless tales from others in the Salesforce community.
I’ve been to a lot of big tech conferences over the years, but the stats on this years Dreamforce were on another level.
171,000 Attendees
3,200 sessions
600 Product workshops
Attendees from 83 Countries.
All of this spread out of about 5 city blocks of San Francisco.
Trying to summarise the learnings and experience in a blog post is difficult, so here are my highlights.
Lightning is the new Salesforce.
Over the past couple of years, the focus has been on the transition from Salesforce Classic, to the new Lightning user experience.
This year it became evident that Lightening is now the new Salesforce and every product announcement went far beyond changes to the user interface, in fact I didn’t see the classic interface presented once over the four days. It’s now clear that organisations who are yet to make the switch are going to be left behind in the coming releases.
Lightning is far more than a prettier version of the existing technology, it’s a ground-up “re-imagining” of the way everything in Salesforce functions. Salesforce has used Lightning as an opportunity to pay down years of technical debt, laying down a foundation for the next wave of innovation.
The true meaning of Software Eco-system.
Software companies have used the word “Eco-System” liberally over the past few years with many of them failing to create open and self-propagating communities that break down the walled gardens of traditional software, allowing the utopia of integrated Software to develop.
A few hours in the Customer Success Expo highlighted the immense scale of the Salesforce Eco-System, with row upon row of vendors pitching a solution for every conceivable business function and challenge. The diversity of solutions on show highlighted that power of the Salesforce Platform to enable Vendors of all sizes to build niche solutions without the traditional burden of building SAAS from the ground up.
Salesforce is the true meaning of a “Software Platform” a unified framework of technologies which allow developers to build a consistent, stable and integrated solution without the need to worry about building the underlying platform architecture.
Einstein is getting smarter.
Last year Salesforce announced Einstein, an artificial intelligence engine built on the Salesforce Platform. We didn’t hear much about Einstein through the year and it wasn’t clear if this was a separate product or something being baked deeper into the platform across all of the Salesforce clouds.
At Dreamforce it became crystal clear that Einstein is a key focus for Salesforce, and the technology presents a huge opportunity for businesses who have taken the time to build systems that centralise their data across various business functions.
The Einstein technology is designed to analyse your Salesforce data and surface insights to the user that assist in making smarter decisions for a range of tasks. This was well demonstrated in the Sales context where Einstein had analysed a customers engagement across a range of Marketing Cloud touch points to identify the best next step for the Sales Person to take based on what was known to have worked on past closed deals.
A focus on Learning.
There was a lot of discussion about the Salesforce economy and the opportunity it presents for Salesforce Consulting and App Exchange partners. With a product as complex Salesforce, training and knowledge sharing across the eco-system is vital to the growth of the product across a wide range of industries.
To facilitate this we saw Salesforce invest heavily in its Learning Management System, Trailhead. At the main Keynote, there was a strong focus on organisations extending Salesforce knowledge beyond the realm of the IT department, enabling all members of the organisation to understand how Salesforce can support the building of business systems and processes.
To facilitate this, Salesforce announced MyTrailhead, a customisable LMS that enables organisations to add their own branding and populate Trailhead with a mixture of Salesforce courses and their own organisational content.
So many parties!!
It wouldn’t be Dreamforce without the parties and there was plenty to choose from.
We were fortunate to be invited to dinner with the Salesforce APAC executive team, where we met some incredible Salesforce customers and had the chance to share our experiences building on the platform whilst having a few laughs over drinks. I even got to meet the E-Way founder and Salesforce Marketing cloud gun Matt Bullock, learning more about his latest venture Spinify.
A Night in The Sky with Bill Nye was a hilarious and thought-provoking event where Bill explained the mechanics of everything from Software to Space, the Climate and Politics. Thanks to Salesforce for the VIP meet and greet, one to tick off the bucket list.
The Dreamfest concert with Lenny Kravitz and Alicia Keys was everything I hoped for and lead to many envious messages from friends back home. I was always a bit sceptical about the attendance figures for Dreamforce, but seeing AT&T park packed to capacity with Dreamforce attendee’s was an experience in itself. The concert was an incredible experience which also showed Salesforce's commitment to the local community, with funds from the event going to support initiatives at the USCF Benioff Children’s Hospital.
