Ryan Nichols

Today’s Dreamforce keynote was about tapping into trends that are even bigger than salesforce.com. The opening video described the astronomic growth of facebook and twitter in the consumer space. The soundtrack was a special song by global super-star will.i.am, telling us that “this is your chance to own it” when it comes to the opportunities in front of us. Benioff pulled not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE different mobile internet devices out of his pockets. Whatever happened to our little conference on customer relationship management?

Even the technology announcements were bigger than how people usually think about salesforce.com. Sure, Salesforce continues to push forward its industry-leading namesake CRM application. The Sales Cloud announcements honestly deserve their own conference (over 50 new features), where we’d talk a lot less about “cloud” and a lot more about the productivity of salespeople. The improvements to reporting, dashboards, chatter, and mobile accessibility will be appreciated by every one of Salesforce’s 100,000 customers.

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