As many of us celebrate the beginning of the holiday season and the end of 2009, it’s a good opportunity to take a step back to see how far we’ve come as an industry in advancing cloud computing. Despite tough economic times this past year, we’ve seen that entrepreneurship and innovation still happen around significant technology and business models like cloud computing – something that may represent the most profound shift our industry has seen in decades. 

Our annual Dreamforce conference has become the de facto industry event for cloud computing and serves as an annual capstone for not only salesforce.com but our entire community of customers and partners too. If past Dreamforce events introduced cloud computing and Force.com to the world, this year’s Dreamforce showcased undeniable proof points of the cloud bringing new business and technical value to IT departments, ISVs, solution providers, and developers – at a pace and intensity unmatched by traditional software.

Companies large and small are recognizing that cloud computing and Force.com gives them both substantial agility and cost advantages – whether it’s CIOs like Yoichi Yokomizo from Lawson (the 2^nd largest convenience store chain in Japan, not Lawson Software) standardizing business processes or CEOs like James Sheppard from Vetrazzo moving their entire businesses in the cloud. Startup ISVs like Benelicious (pictured right, winner of the 2009 Force.com 40 Innovation Showcase) and Appirio are enjoying the capital-efficiency and time-to-market of Force.com and can deliver applications that are challenging larger traditional vendors. 

Even some of the largest software companies in the world are moving key product lines to Force.com and accelerating decades of domain expertise to the cloud. Solution providers are also finding new channel opportunities in cloud by reselling Force.com, shedding low-margin, client-server reseller businesses to bring the power of the cloud to their customers.

We are in the middle of a very profound shift indeed.

So as we start thinking about the new year and new opportunities, it’s time for us to focus our vision and investments. With exciting new innovations like Chatter, Salesforce.com certainly will continue to do our part in fueling this shift in 2010….and we’re looking for new partners to join us in the mission.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Day two of Dreamforce is coming to an end, or should I say a beginning? I just stepped out of the afternoon' keynote with Marc Benioff and General Colin Powell. I don't know about you, but whenever General Colin Powell speaks I always walk away inspired to do something new --- something bold --- something great.

I guess great pretty well sums up today.

 I spent most of the day in the Force.com Zone helping customers with their Apex and Visualforce questions, and then ran off to give my presentation on Google Wave. If you were in the session, thanks for attending and bearing with the last minute scramble we had. But everything turned out perfect. Somehow it always does.

For many people in the audience this was their first exposure to Google Wave beyond the videos and youtube recordings. We had a little fun in the session connecting Google Wave to Salesforce for a unique Customer support experience, arranged a post presentation get-together, and even provided a bunch of free Google Wave Preview accounts for all the folks in the audience to get in and build upon what we built. I hope everyone who was lucky to get a Google Wave account, jumps right in and starts building Robots. (tip: request a Sandbox account, and really do something cool --- if you do, I would love to hear about it)

I will post all the sample code from the main demo, as well as the Wave Robot we built, to help kickstart the innovation, as soon as I get a chance. In the meantime, here are a few snippets from Sassy the Wave Robot as he dutifully connects the clouds:

for (Event e: bundle.getEvents()) {

      if(e.getType() == EventType.BLIP_SUBMITTED) {

          TextView msg = e.getBlip().getDocument();

          LOG.warning("MESG:"+msg.getText());

          if(msg.getText().startsWith("get cases")) {

      Blip blip = wavelet.appendBlip();

                TextView textView = blip.getDocument();

                textView.delete();

                textView.append("fetching cases \n");

                //create our agent

                SFDCAgent agent = getAgent();

                //query for solutions

                Set<Solution> results = agent.getSolutions();

                //loop through the results printing out the titles

                StringBuffer buf = new StringBuffer();

                for (Solution s : results) {

                    buf.append("\nTITLE: "+s.getTitle()+"\n");

                }

                TextView resultsView = blip.getDocument();

                resultsView.delete();

                resultsView.append("\nHere are "+results.size()+" tasty, fresh cases:\n"+buf.toString());

          }

      }

If you at Dreamforce, make sure you go out and enjoy the night time activities. Remember the clouds don't go away just because the sun goes down.

Phew...what a day! I'm sitting in the middle of this years hackathon completely exhausted from a big day of announcements, and code consultations. There are dozens of people, heads down trying to finish their code in time for the end of the competition. Unlike me, however, the bowed heads represent furious coding, and not exhaustion.

As you may have heard salesforce.com announced a new platform for enterprise collaboration called Chatter.  Most people have access to cooler, newer technologies in their homes compared to what they are forced to use at work - slower machines, restricted set of phones they can use and e-mail being the primary way to collaborate.  In terms of collaboration, the consumer web has moved much, much ahead - so much so that most high school and college students now primarily use facebook and other social media tools to communicate with each other.  What if the same collaboration paradigm is bought inside the enterprise keeping the same ease of communication while making it enterprise ready in terms of security, governance & extensibility?  What if the same tool / platform was not just for employees to interact with each other but also for enterprise application that proactively notified users about significant events in the business applications?  This would fundamentally change the way employees collaborate with each other and the way they leverage the data in their enterprise applications.  That is the promise and potential of Chatter - watch for more details in the days to come.