Since 2003, the year of the first Dreamforce, this annual tech conference has become the biggest event in the industry. And it’s not limited to the tech sector: Dreamforce has played host to such touring bands as Metallica, the Beach Boys, and this year, the Foo Fighters, the Killers, Stevie Wonder, and more. With a turnout that equals roughly 20% of San Francisco, this year’s Dreamforce was by far its biggest.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce (which organizes Dreamforce) was a busy man over DF15’s four day party – he engaged with tech luminaries on the keynote stage, took a selfie with Stevie Wonder, discussed big data and breast cancer with a leading oncology expert, examined the state of gender diversity in his own company with a panel of powerful women, began his campaign for president, and launched tons of product. If you weren’t one of the 170,000 in attendance, here are 8 things you missed at Dreamforce 2015.
Salesforce’s new software services
Salesforce, the titan of CRMs and organizer of Dreamforce would not let the biggest bash of the tech-verse pass without throwing a few new company goodies into the mix. Last year, Salesforce launched Wave Analytics Cloud, a program that can give business user and analyst direct, real-time insights into customer engagement, and deliver data to IT professionals over their cloud platform.
This year, after some criticism over its price, Salesforce has decided to drop a new Wave Analytics app that is less than half of what it used to cost, and improved Wave integration with a number of useful third-party apps that are currently in pilot season. Another new product announcement from the Salesforce team was the Salesforce IQ, a new CRM platform that uses “relationship intelligence” data to derive insights and automatically log and automate basic tasks for small to medium-sized businesses.
[Okay, I may as well just say it straight out: if you didn’t get one of the Salesforce backpack’s with Dreamforce stitched on one carrying strap, a water bottle…and the inside of the pack to die for…really, if you didn’t get one – it sucks to be you!] [Oh, and one more thing, my mom (also a business woman) won’t stop talking about Parker Harris in his tightie-widie lightening suit. She thinks it was one of the most clever, memorable advertising feats in a long time…and she could even repeat what he talked about, so it wasn’t just the suit!]
Stevie Wonder, the Foo Fighters, the Killers, and John Legend
Dreamforce has always been known for their killer musical lineups (last year, the surprise guests were the Beach Boys). This year, Dreamforce really set the roof on fire with such guests as the Foo Fighters, the Killers and John Legend who played the after party, as well as a surprise appearance by Marc Benioff’s buddy Stevie Wonder, who showed up during the main keynote speech. Stevie Wonder performed all his big hits, and even serenaded the crowd, with a slight edit to a classic favorite: “Dreamforce is the sunshine of my life.”
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft talking about the future of data and technology
Dreamforce is probably one of the year’s biggest opportunities for entrepreneurs, analysts, and technologists to network and pal around, and nobody did more palling around than Salesforce and Microsoft. Salesforce announced back in May 2014 that they would be building more CRM apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.1 and this week saw the release of the Salesforce App for Outlook, as well as Salesforce1 Mobile App for Office.
In his keynote speech, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, shared his predictions about an impending workforce that gravitates around “data culture,” the next era of computing as defined by wearable technologies, the user experience, and how to navigate a world of big data.
The Dreamboat
When the volume of projected guest list surpasses that of available hotel rooms in downtown San Francisco, what does Salesforce do? They rent a cruise boat, of course. 1,100 lucky guests (of the roughly 170,000 who attended) enjoyed a stay in the inaugural Dreamboat, a Salesforce-branded 12-story cruise liner that boasts a martini lounge and several poolside bars, a running track, an upscale restaurant, a club, an arcade, a theatre, luxury suites and rooms, a security entrance that rivals your regular American airport, and the top-shelf amenities which would befit a grand hotel. Of course, it’s not a hotel – it’s a Dreamboat. And if you missed it this year, then be sure to reserve your room early for Dreamforce 2016, when they call in two of these luxury liners.
Fireside chat between Travis Kalanick (CEO of Uber) and Marc Benioff
A month and a half after launching UberPool, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick sat down with Marc Benioff for an hour-long talk about this new service, which is used by 100,000 people in a handful of cities, as well as price surges in emergency situations (one solution is using predictive data to create heat maps on drivers’ apps to isolate high-demand areas), the future of transportation technology (Uber has hired robotic car engineers to help develop self-driving car technology, saying, “We don’t want to be like the taxi industry before us. We’re a technology company.”).
Marc Benioff shared his experience using UberPool with a Goldman Sachs banker (“We’re big fans of those guys,” replied Kalanick, with some undetermined amount of sarcasm), and we found out from Kalanick that there are thousands of drives per minute, at any given time of the day. If you missed the talk, you can watch the video stream of their Fireside Chat on Salesforce.com.
Women’s Leadership Summit
For Dreamforce’s inaugural Women’s Leadership Summit, Salesforce brought in some of the top female CEOs and celebrities to shed light on how the tech industry can hope to achieve gender equality. All day, the summit opened up discussions on pay inequality, introducing more young women to science, technology, engineering and maths fields, and what companies like Salesforce and Microsoft are doing to increase gender diversity. Key speakers Jessica Alba (CEO of the Honest Company) and Susan Wojcicki (CEO of Youtube) shed some light on the realities of being women in the tech industry during a keynote panel, with Wojcicki stating, “It’s a pipeline problem.
The number of women with computer science degrees is 20%, and then it’s a retention problem.” She went on to highlight the importance of paid maternity leave: “What we found was having a longer paid maternity leave actually helped us retain women.” Other speakers in the Women’s Leadership Summit included Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz, Katrina Lake (CEO and founder of StitchFix), Leah Busque,CEO of TaskRabbit, actress Goldie Hawn, and Patricia Arquette, who made headlines last year by demanding wage equality in Hollywood during her Oscar acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Boyhood.
Launch of the WISDOM study
Surgeon and breast cancer oncology expert Laura J. Esserman took to the main keynote stage to announce a new partnership with Salesforce to launch a $14.1 million that will apply Salesforce’s personalized data collection to test new breast cancer screening methods. The Wisdom study is a collaboration with University of California, San Francisco, and the Athena Breast Health Network, and will use Salesforce’s big data-driven marketing tools to finding the right therapies to help treat the right people.
Esserman explained in her discussion with Marc Benioff, “Breast cancer isn’t one disease, it’s many diseases.” She continued, “We have to know how our treatments work for each type of breast cancer.” This study is a dynamic step towards improving the lives of cancer survivors, as well as creating more survivors. Dr. Esserman is confident that she can maximize her research with the help of, not just the audience, but everyone else: “It’s only by everyone working together that we’re going to have a different future.”
You may want to consider that you don’t miss Dreamforce 2016. You can start to pre-register – right now on line on the salesforce.com website.