Dreamforce ’15 – 5 Key Highlights

It’s hard to believe Dreamforce ’15 is over. Four days jam packed with breakout sessions, networking, parties and sightseeing went by fast – and in case you missed anything, here are some of the key takeaways of the world’s biggest cloud expo.

1. Benioff’s Keynote: During his keynote, Marc Benioff shared a vision for customer success – in a whole new way. The new, innovative solutions surrounding the biggest Customer Success Platform – Salesforce include:
   • Lightning: The New Lightning Experience was unveiled earlier this month. The three components of Lightning: Lightning Experience, Lightning Ecosystem, and Lightning Platform, make Salesforce usage easier than ever. The new Lightning Experience is packed with multiple features to help users sell faster, work more productively, and make better decisions.
   • Salesforce IQ: Dreamforce ’15 kicked off with the launch of Salesforce IQ, an intelligent and intuitive addition to the Customer Success Platform. Salesforce declared that they are moving from a world of relationship management to a world of relationship intelligence. Salesforce IQ can be adapted in two ways:
     • First is Salesforce IQ for SMBs, which is a next gen CRM platform powered by Relationship Intelligence Technology – helping small teams to gain deeper insights into their customers and streamline their selling.
     • Second is the Salesforce IQ for Sales Cloud; which allows reps to sell smarter leveraging Relationship Intelligence right from their inbox. The most innovating global companies including are supercharging their sales with Salesforce IQ.
   • Salesforce IoT Cloud: Salesforce’s another big announcement was the launch of Salesforce IoT Cloud, a platform for gathering insights and coordinating marketing activities across connected devices. IoT Cloud is powered by Salesforce Thunder, a real-time event processing engine that empowers customers to personalize the way they sell, service, and market. It connects billions of events from devices, sensors, applications and more from the Internet of Things to Salesforce – giving business users a valuable 360-degree profile of their customer.
2. Fireside Chat with Satya Nadella: Microsoft’s chief executive, Nadella, talked about how sales teams can use Microsoft outlook with Salesforce to manage customer accounts efficiently. He also spoke about the importance of data culture and how it transforms businesses. He said, “If you look back at this era and try to understand what the big technology shift is, it’s going to be characterised by what we did with data. That is going to be the big change we will see in the years to come where the data culture is what transforms businesses and the way we work. Pretty much every device has exhaustive data and every application on those devices has exhaustive data.”
3. Fireside Chat with Marc Benioff and Travis Kalanick: Travis Kalanick, Co-Founder and CEO during the ‘fireside chat’ with Marc Benioff talked about technology and innovation, Uber’s next phase of innovation, and how predictive analytics has helped them anticipate market demand. Uber also showcased their expanding B2B service for Business and their new car-pooling feature UberPoo, at the conference.
4. Women’s Leadership Summit: Dreamforce ’15 spent an entire day focussing on workplace equality. Corporate leaders from YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki to Oscar-winner Patricia Arquette discussed how they are bringing in workplace equality in their organizations. Wojcicki, mother of five children, was surprised to learn just 12% of women receive paid maternity leave in the private sector and that 25% go back to work after ten days. She emphasized on increasing the parental leave as she felt this could increase retention rate.
5. Give away one million books: Everyday at Dreamforce was devoted to a different cause, including education, technology, workplace equality and veterans. Dreamforce was able to collect 1 million books for donating to needy kids. The total number was 1,006,225, making it the world’s largest book drive ever.

And that’s the wrap for Dreamforce ’15. Let’s gear up for another amazing year of learning, innovation, networking and fun! Missed Dreamforce ’15? Check out the live session recordings.