This is the moment most of the people that flock to Dreamforce each year can't wait for: salesforce.com's CEO and Chairman Marc Benioff's keynote addresses.
Benioff's keynotes are eagerly anticipated because it's most often the moment he delivers big news, announces new features, unveils acquisitions...in short, break news. In his second keynote, he did it again.
Yesterday's keynote was all about applications, Benioff said. Today was to be all about platforms. But it was also about Salesforce.com's investments as it pushes deeper into enterprise operations market.
- Benioff started the keynote by announcing that the company is investing in Kenandy, a manufacturing management platform that is built on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform. Joining in the investment is the well-known venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, which led a $10.5 million round for the startup.
The startup plans to eliminate "big boxes" by putting the manufacturing software on a social, cloud-based platform.
- Earlier in the day, Infor, a business operations software company, announced it was releasing new applications built on Force.com, called InForce, and receiving an investment from Salesforce.com. Infor's CEO Charles Phillips joined Benioff on stage.
Beyond the investment announcements, much of the session covered the ground laid at the previous day's keynote. Salesforce.com executives spotlighted how company's like Facebook, Kelly Services and Warner Brothers were building applications on platforms like Database.com, Force.com and Heroku.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic, took the stage to demonstrate how the company's integration with Salesforce's Database.com made it possible for sales to track lead activity from mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.
- Tim Campos, CIO of Facebook, showed how the social networking giant uses Salesforce.com to make human resources functions like performance reviews more social by integrating an employees internal social graph.
- George Hu, EVP of Platform, Marketing and Operations, announced that Salesforce.com's Winter 12 release would include Chatter Connect, Touch.Salesforce.com, Streaming API and Apex REST API, and the Visual Workflow.
- Salesforce.com announced that Heroku for the Enterprise packages were now available.
(Disclosure: Eloqua and salesforce.com have a variety of customer/vendor, sponsorship and other arrangements between the two companies.)