The Black Crowes and Appy Awards – Highlights from Dreamforce 2009

I just returned from the 2009 DreamForce conference in San Francisco. Over 16,000 people attended, making it one of the largest cloud computing conferences in North America. Accenture was there. Google was there. IBM was there. Twitter was a premier sponsor. An additional 250 other small cloud vendors were there as well. Colin Powell spoke at the keynote. The Black Crowes sang at the gala event. It was awesome.

We use Box.net for our FTP File sharing needs and EchoSign for our e-signature services. These two services plug into Salesforce.com very nicely. The Salesforce.com AppExchange (App Store) is the enterprise version of Apple’s App Store. Most of Salesforce.com’s third party apps can be installed within hours by our team of non-technical people. Our modest integration got us into the Power of Us Appy Awards:

“Appy Award nominees are recognized for transforming their business with the power of cloud computing. Appy Award recipients are nominated based on their innovative usage of Salesforce CRM or the Force.com platform in bringing new levels of customer success to their sales, marketing, partner, service, support or IT organizations.”

We didn’t win. But it was cool to see our logo so big on the same stage that the Black Crowes played on. And it fuels our interest in technology solutions – open source or not – that provide us the most resource effective way to reach our mission.

Salesforce.com will be launching Chatter, a new tool that brings social communication to enterprise software. Our team has looked at it and can’t wait for the release. It is going to change the way we work as a team. Aloha!