Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

I had the opportunity to attend the Salesforce.com, Cloudforce event last week.  Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff was in tune as usual with all the energy of a first-grader after a second bowl of Count Chocula.  And while Mark’s keynote carried the standard theme’s;  Software as a Service,  10th anniversary,  and metrics of customer success with Salesforce:

• 52% increase in leads
• 34% boost in revenues
• 23% decrease in service and support costs
• 30% improvement in customer retention
• 80% reduction in application development effort

What was most interesting was the change in the tone of the attendees.  Fast forward six months from Dreamforce when cloud computing was defiantly a known entity but not a fait accompli for most visitors to today where it was a matter of fact: Customers, attendees and the press talked as if every application was running in the cloud and organizations no longer bothered with buying servers, software installs and service contracts. 

Granted the Cloudforce events are a microcosm, but unlike many technologies that take years to gestate and then even longer to move to emotional acceptance, the vision of centralized computing is back in vogue…. And for good reason.  As Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce’s senior director of product marketing put it “The vision of the company from Day 1 has been that it should be as easy to use a business application as it is easy to buy a book on Amazon.com”