I had the opportunity to visit DreamForce , the user conference for Salesforce.com in San Francisco  and wow was I impressed. 70,000 users in attendance it was crazy. Great keynotes such as Richard Branson , Colin Powell and Tony Robbins were blasted for free down closed off streets outside and in conference hotels. The exbibit hall was jammed pack and not nearly large enough for the audience. Walking the halls it was interesting in that their vertical Sales Force Automation , has the same issue as the  HCM vertical… they are all talking the same thing but doing something very different. When you walked to floor all the lingo was SFA , campaigns, social but you had to really drill down to figure out what people actually did . Proposal Management, Lead scoring, Systems Integration. Consulting, Data Cleansing, Analytics. …. So what did I learn, from a HR Perspective …
a.       A few companies plan to use the salesforce app exchange to drive business and leads, leaving their business to focus mostly on development . JobScience a firm that has been around 15 plus years , has retooled their entire Applicant tracking system on the force platform and has experience great growth in the last 3 years.
b.       A new firm Vana HCM ( just receive Series A funding) has built on the force and is one the larger HCM parnters capitalizing off the 120,000 Sales force clients.
c.       Firms like CyberU ( a jobscience spin off and now property of Cornerstone on Demand is focused on selling sales training.
d.       And finally Salesforce.com themselves announced work.com the new Rypple platform with a lot of flash and emphasis on social recognition now with an amazon catalogue.
e.        We also saw a major partnership with Workday and Knowledge Infusion… but I wonder how long it will be before workday enters the salesforce automation business as they intend to go full ERP.

It was great to see these HCM offerings in this alternative Cloud ecosystem. … and to imagine the possibilities but that really set in when I say a demo of a project Virgin Airways is working on . So I will start this with when is the last time your local airline actually thought of you as a client or even treated you with respect. Unless your flying Southwest in the US and maybe Jetblue probably never . Richard Branson in his keynote said why does flying have to be boring. Can’t we make it fun ? So now when you are on a Virgin airways flight , your screen pops up and says welcome back Debbie would you like to order a vodka tonic like last flight? It shows you a social map of others on the flight and if these people let you , you can see their social profiles and message them… it tells you if your flight has been delayed and if there are gate changes …in advance of your landing. It has the potential to connect you to important people (integrated to the Salesforce platform. ) oh I see Dan’s boss is sitting in row 5, I’ve been after Dan for 3 weeks for this outstanding contract may be I should introduce myself to him . I see a upcoming flight being a large social event , drinks networking , chatter and fun… no more sleeping for me .

Great job on the conference Salesforce. Logistically your GUYS rock and set the bar at 5 Star. . Oh yeah , the final learning Sale people and marketing people have way more money that HR peeps .