Marc Benioff and company certainly know how to put on a show. In fact, Benioff has been putting on Dreamforce customer spectacles since 2003 — that is, until the pandemic came along and put the whole shebang online for a couple of years.
With the Salesforce event back live and in person this week, just in time for its 20th anniversary, everyone seemed to be happy to be together at a live event.
With a reported in-person attendance of 40,000, it was significantly smaller than the peak pre-pandemic numbers of over 150,000, when every hotel in San Francisco would sell out, but it was still substantial. And if you count the 110,000 who watched some part of the event online (including myself), you could argue it was about the same.
At a press conference this week, Salesforce co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor certainly welcomed the opportunity to speak to folks again in person, whether that was customers, analysts, investors or the press. They said because Salesforce had grown so significantly since the last in-person Dreamforce, it was actually also the first time for many of the company's employees to attend.
While it might not have the numbers of live attendees of years past, there were still celebrities aplenty, including Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Hudson and Bono. There was also Magic Johnson, Jane Goodall and Al Gore, to name but a few of the luminaries who showed up. Dreamforce always has star power, and the company didn’t skimp on its first in-person gathering in three years.
And the live musical event — which in the past has featured A-list bands like U2 and the Foo Fighters — this year was the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Of course, it wouldn't be Dreamforce without co-founders Benioff and Parker Harris goofing it up on stage, highlighting whatever new tech the company was introducing.
As you might guess, it wasn't all fun and games and pageantry. There were also some significant announcements. Let's have a look at some of the highlights, shall we?
Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back
Maybe because it's been a while since the gang was together, the hype you might expect was lacking and that led me to wonder if there was going to be big news. In the week prior to the event, I appeared on Brent Leary's A Few Good Minutes podcast on LinkedIn Live. Leary asked me what I expected from Dreamforce.
“You know, it feels like [the industry] is a little stagnated to me,” I told him. “And I’m not sure where it’s going to go, and at some point, you are who you are, and that’s OK. I mean, it’s not a criticism. It’s just to say that it’s stagnated. It's like they've incorporated everything.”
But I wasn't completely wrong when I said:
“It’s about how much easier they can make it for users. And I think that’s really what Salesforce is working on at this point … how do they simplify some of this complexity?”
Unbeknownst to me, the company had been working on a major overhaul on how they move data around, dubbed Genie. Patrick Stokes, EVP and general manager of platform at Salesforce, told me Genie was going to be the biggest announcement at the conference, and he was right.
By the way, Genie is very much related to simplifying what had been a bunch of complex tasks to share data.
That's because it involved pulling together a number of elements: the CDP (customer data platform); a newly built data lake; the Hyperforce, Salesforce's infrastructure platform announced in 2020; Einstein for intelligence; and Flow for automation to move data around the platform to wherever it's needed, whether an internal Salesforce application or an external partner like Snowflake or Amazon SageMaker.
Image Credits: Natasha Mascarenhas / technewss
“Genie has the greatest potential to be a game-changer, and as was stated often by the keynote presenters, it's the biggest architectural change to the platform since 2005,” Leary told me. He said that the keynote demos really illustrated the potential of what can be done when you remove the silos and have the data flowing, where it can be quickly analyzed to help customers and employees have more meaningful interactions and experiences.
Taylor said at the press event that Genie was a response to customer demand for simplicity. “We're making things that previously involved a lot of programming and technical complexity, and for our customers a lot of costs, and we made it easier to use with clicks not code,” he said.
But Leary said it wasn't clear how the company would price Genie, and that was troubling to him. “The one glaring and important thing left out about Genie was the lack of clarity around pricing. It was asked numerous times, and yet no definitive answers were given.”
He said it's not clear if it's just part of the platform — you simply get it when you buy other Salesforce products — or if it's something you have to pay for. That confusion tends to pop up when you have a platform-level set of services and insist on branding it, as the company has done with Genie.
Slack also made a couple of significant announcements including adding video to Huddles, the short meeting tool on the platform. Slack indicated that the video capability was something that customers had been requesting.
The company also announced Canvas, a new way of saving information in a persistent way inside Slack conversation channels. This takes advantage of another product in the Salesforce family, Quip, which the company acquired in 2016 (and got Bret Taylor in the bargain).
The fact that Slack incorporated Quip is even more interesting when you consider a story that Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield told me at the time Salesforce bought Slack.
“I actually talked to Bret in the early days of the pandemic to see if they wanted to sell us Quip because I thought it would be good for us, and I didn't really know what their plans were [for it]. He said he'd get back to me, and then got back to me six months later or so,” Butterfield said.
At that point, the conversation flipped and the companies began a series of discussions that eventually led to Salesforce acquiring Slack.
There were questions about Slack's role in the broader hack of Uber recently. Benioff did not shy away from questions, recognizing that he needed to take responsibility for Slack's role. “There’s no finish line when it comes to security, and I think when we see some of the social engineering issues that are going on, there’s things that we’re going to need to do to help our customers prevent these kinds of issues,” Benioff said at the press event.
He added, “We’ve been through every possible situation over almost a quarter century, and what we’ve learned is that we are in a constantly unfolding world regarding cybersecurity and there’s a lot for us to do in perpetuity. Just keep working at it.”
There was, of course, so much more — too much for one roundup. You don't hold an event of this magnitude without a bushel of announcements, but the news really was that Dreamforce was back, and after three years online and 20 years of hosting, that was the best news of all.
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