It was a big month for users' conferences, analyst meetings and reunions. On one side of Moscone was Intel's Developer Forum and on the other SalesForce's DreamForce. IDF was a geek fest, DreamForce something entirely different. Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff made good on his promise for a two hour keynote (still nothing like Fidel's 8 hour rants) and delivered a lot of interesting news. SF has renamed their SaaS platform Force.com for one. The platform has in fact become significantly more platformish with the addition of a revisable UI for an application ("Visual Force" not unexpectedly) and the ability to store unstructured (non database) content. Kevin Kettler, Dell CTO, spoke about Dell IdeaStorm, a customer facing website that Dell developed with SalesForce which enables the creation and "promotion" (voting on) of ideas for Dell. Kettler said that IdeaStorm had already (the site has only been up since Febuary) transformed how Dell thinks about product development and greatly accelerated the product conception and planning process. All of this suggests to me that SaaS is going around a very important corner in terms of being mainstream. That impression was reinforced by a couple of non-profit applications that were demonstrated. The first was from the Bronx Lab school and was an application for coordinating teacher/teacher, teacher/parent and teacher/student communications. It's an ideal SF application because it centers on people and relationships. The application is both simple and useful, didn't take long to get going and simple to revise and add to. Palo Alto has a home grown (inferior) server equivalent (InClass). The comparison makes it clear that applications like that should be SaaS implemented from today onward. The second application was called Homeless Connect and had been developed with the City of San Francisco. It provided coordination between all the agencies providing homeless services. Apparently each had their own data system dedicated to providing reports to their funder proving they were doing the right job, but doing nothing for the client. Now all agencies can understand (a) the overall objectives for each client and (b) what each agency is doing for that client. Again the application is simple, useful and readily evolved, and the same conclusion: there are large categories of local government software that should always be built as SaaS going forward. I'm struggling for the right analogy; maybe it's the Excel spreadsheet of today. Over the years amazing and valuable tools have been built on top of Excel, much more rapidly than conventional applications could be built. Maybe we should think of SalesForce as the network analog, now scalable with worldwide access enabled.
