10.17
Dreamforce 2014: Silicon Valley’s Thirst to Transcend Bits and Bytes
A traditional Hawaiian blessing opens Dreamforce 2014 on October 14, 2014 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif. –Image from a video produced by Salesforce.
The world’s biggest software conference ended Thursday night–though conference may not be the right word.
Dreamforce 2014 was also equal parts luau, spring break, rock festival, food drive, and TEDx. With over 145,000 registered visitors from more than 90 countries, plus another 5 million watching the videostream, the event spilled out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center into adjacent streets and a half dozen nearby hotels, practically shutting down a portion of downtown San Francisco for four days.
But the sprawl wasn’t merely physical. Staged by Salesforce, which offers business software as a service on the Web, the annual event straddled business, entertainment, politics, philanthropy, and what have come to be called big ideas. Dreamforce is emblematic of the fact that technology is increasingly embedded in global culture at large, and the theory that technology companies–even makers of business software–can implant themselves in users’ lives by allying themselves with powers far afield of software, hardware, and their markets as they are usually conceived.
Where most other companies that run their own confabs are content to focus on issues related to using and selling their products, Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s effusive founder and CEO, aspired to something grander. (Or sillier: Staff wore Hawaiian shirts and garlands, and traditional dancers were flown in from Hawaii to “bless” the event.)
Hillary Clinton gave a keynote and sat for an onstage interview with Klaus Schwab, the chief executive of the World Economic Forum. Attendees—mostly Salesforce customers–helped donate three million meals to charity and $9 million to children’s hospitals. Concert attractions included fresh-faced Bruno Mars and wizened Beach Boys, while product demos were delivered by rapper will.i.am (a wrist computer) and singer/songwriter Neil Young (a digital music system). Outside Moscone Center, local food vendors handed out cupcakes emblazoned with Clinton’s and Benioff’s names, while attendees sank into beanbag chairs to dine on free sandwiches while watching a Michael Jackson cover band.
In between, the crowd soaked up as many of the 1,500 lectures and workshops as they could cram into a day, from “Best Practices to Manage Digital Marketing” to “Reimagine Everything,” delivered by Al Gore.
To techies, who are familiar with both Benioff’s marketing prowess and his peers’ extravagant parties, this sort of bounty may not seem out of place. To those outside the Silicon Valley fishbowl, though, it may seem bizarre that a company selling software to help sales teams would strive for such outsized relevance.
“It looks cultish,” said Melissa Nelson, Vice President of SilverLine, a company that provides consulting services and tools on top of Salesforce’s software platform. “But I don’t think people feel that way.”
Salesforce CMO Lynn Vojvodich, whose team spends the better part of a year working on Dreamforce, described it as “transformative,” a word that has gained currency as technology has roiled industry after industry but also resonates with a sense that the world at large is in need drastic reshaping. The conference’s intellectual heft also reflects Silicon Valley’s growing footprint on the global map, she added.
Indeed, the tech cluster has never been a more potent force. From smart phones to smarter apps, networked gadgets are obvious agents of social, political and economic metamorphosis. The uprisings of the Tahrir Square, Euromaidan, and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement have been branded Twitter TWTR +1.12% Revolutions. Highly educated software engineers who flock to Silicon Valley seek not just to find a job but to change the world. Technology’s capacity to turn the ordinary into something surprising and magnificent has turned Apple AAPL +1.46% and Google GOOGL -2.60% into iconic companies.
Dreamforce is Salesforce’s bid to capture a bit of the same magic. “We’re not just selling a product,” Vojvodich said. “We want to engage the whole person.”
By many accounts, they came close.
“It gives you a breadth of the capabilities of where you can go–that Nirvana, that dream state–so you can have customers for life,” said Maureen Boyd, of the Assistance Fund, a social service group that subsidizes medical costs for people with chronic illnesses. Boyd uses Salesforce software to manage the organization’s database of patients, paying a non-profit rate.
“It’s a whole giving-back phenomenon,” said Linda Sheaffer, a senior director at the Red Cross, which uses Salesforce software to manage fundraising events.
“It’s just a great way to knock out a bunch of learning.” said Eric Crum, director of customer relationship management at Panera Bread. “When you’re just back home in your office, it’s hard to make the connections between what you’re doing and worldwide problems.”
Of course, no one touts the power of sales software to address global issues more forcefully than Benioff himself, who has donated $200 million to children’s hospitals and pledges 1% each of his company’s profit, equity, and person-hours to charity. As he took the cloud-shaped stage for his Tuesday keynote (which a wide-eyed Bloomberg TV reporter later characterized as “like watching Moses part the Red Sea”), the auditorium darkened, lasers shot skyward, and a prerecorded voice boomed, “Every industry is being disrupted. Everyone is being connected. The customer now rules.”
Two hours later, Benioff was still talking. He had shifted his topic from philanthropy to a vision of “trillions of customer interactions” transmitted by smartphones. “We’ve seen the rise of our customers,” he thundered. “There’s this imperative to connect! There’s this imperative to connect!”
Dreamforce 2014 was also equal parts luau, spring break, rock festival, food drive, and TEDx. With over 145,000 registered visitors from more than 90 countries, plus another 5 million watching the videostream, the event spilled out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center into adjacent streets and a half dozen nearby hotels, practically shutting down a portion of downtown San Francisco for four days.
But the sprawl wasn’t merely physical. Staged by Salesforce, which offers business software as a service on the Web, the annual event straddled business, entertainment, politics, philanthropy, and what have come to be called big ideas. Dreamforce is emblematic of the fact that technology is increasingly embedded in global culture at large, and the theory that technology companies–even makers of business software–can implant themselves in users’ lives by allying themselves with powers far afield of software, hardware, and their markets as they are usually conceived.
Where most other companies that run their own confabs are content to focus on issues related to using and selling their products, Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s effusive founder and CEO, aspired to something grander. (Or sillier: Staff wore Hawaiian shirts and garlands, and traditional dancers were flown in from Hawaii to “bless” the event.)
Hillary Clinton gave a keynote and sat for an onstage interview with Klaus Schwab, the chief executive of the World Economic Forum. Attendees—mostly Salesforce customers–helped donate three million meals to charity and $9 million to children’s hospitals. Concert attractions included fresh-faced Bruno Mars and wizened Beach Boys, while product demos were delivered by rapper will.i.am (a wrist computer) and singer/songwriter Neil Young (a digital music system). Outside Moscone Center, local food vendors handed out cupcakes emblazoned with Clinton’s and Benioff’s names, while attendees sank into beanbag chairs to dine on free sandwiches while watching a Michael Jackson cover band.
In between, the crowd soaked up as many of the 1,500 lectures and workshops as they could cram into a day, from “Best Practices to Manage Digital Marketing” to “Reimagine Everything,” delivered by Al Gore.
To techies, who are familiar with both Benioff’s marketing prowess and his peers’ extravagant parties, this sort of bounty may not seem out of place. To those outside the Silicon Valley fishbowl, though, it may seem bizarre that a company selling software to help sales teams would strive for such outsized relevance.
“It looks cultish,” said Melissa Nelson, Vice President of SilverLine, a company that provides consulting services and tools on top of Salesforce’s software platform. “But I don’t think people feel that way.”
Salesforce CMO Lynn Vojvodich, whose team spends the better part of a year working on Dreamforce, described it as “transformative,” a word that has gained currency as technology has roiled industry after industry but also resonates with a sense that the world at large is in need drastic reshaping. The conference’s intellectual heft also reflects Silicon Valley’s growing footprint on the global map, she added.
Indeed, the tech cluster has never been a more potent force. From smart phones to smarter apps, networked gadgets are obvious agents of social, political and economic metamorphosis. The uprisings of the Tahrir Square, Euromaidan, and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement have been branded Twitter TWTR +1.12% Revolutions. Highly educated software engineers who flock to Silicon Valley seek not just to find a job but to change the world. Technology’s capacity to turn the ordinary into something surprising and magnificent has turned Apple AAPL +1.46% and Google GOOGL -2.60% into iconic companies.
Dreamforce is Salesforce’s bid to capture a bit of the same magic. “We’re not just selling a product,” Vojvodich said. “We want to engage the whole person.”
By many accounts, they came close.
“It gives you a breadth of the capabilities of where you can go–that Nirvana, that dream state–so you can have customers for life,” said Maureen Boyd, of the Assistance Fund, a social service group that subsidizes medical costs for people with chronic illnesses. Boyd uses Salesforce software to manage the organization’s database of patients, paying a non-profit rate.
“It’s a whole giving-back phenomenon,” said Linda Sheaffer, a senior director at the Red Cross, which uses Salesforce software to manage fundraising events.
“It’s just a great way to knock out a bunch of learning.” said Eric Crum, director of customer relationship management at Panera Bread. “When you’re just back home in your office, it’s hard to make the connections between what you’re doing and worldwide problems.”
Of course, no one touts the power of sales software to address global issues more forcefully than Benioff himself, who has donated $200 million to children’s hospitals and pledges 1% each of his company’s profit, equity, and person-hours to charity. As he took the cloud-shaped stage for his Tuesday keynote (which a wide-eyed Bloomberg TV reporter later characterized as “like watching Moses part the Red Sea”), the auditorium darkened, lasers shot skyward, and a prerecorded voice boomed, “Every industry is being disrupted. Everyone is being connected. The customer now rules.”
Two hours later, Benioff was still talking. He had shifted his topic from philanthropy to a vision of “trillions of customer interactions” transmitted by smartphones. “We’ve seen the rise of our customers,” he thundered. “There’s this imperative to connect! There’s this imperative to connect!”
For a moment, everyone believed him.
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