Dreamforce Day One - Episode #22 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 22nd episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the first day of Dreamforce here in December 2010. This episode is titled Dreamforce Day One. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, your cloud community experts, and I am Jason Atwood. Joining me live from the Moscone Center, Moscone West, is Justin. Justin, how are you doing?

Justin Edelstein: Doing good. Sitting here at a table in the back of the Cloud Dine area near the Birds of a Feather area.

Jason Atwood: this is first for us we are doing a on-site on location on location like reporters it's recorded live yeah but it won't be heard live right we just got out of actually just got out lunch with a great person from Salesforce but uh great Michael Roth the great great Michael Roth from Salesforce.com and but we sat through the keynote so lots to talk about today just to all keynote all Salesforce edition and so what was announced? Give me the rundown and

Justin Edelstein: let's talk about it. Alright so as always there was a big announcement. The big announcement was database.com launched this morning. Yep. So that is actually out there as far as the website being out there. Not sure the service is ready to be consumed yet by people but it is out there. I think you can sign up for it. sign up for maybe a little trial? For a trial. Alright.

Jason Atwood: So for those who have, you know, want to learn more information, database.com is, you know, it's a cloud database, but it's a lot more different from them in terms of what they normally do because...

Justin Edelstein: Well, let me run through the rest of the thing and then we'll dive into it. Alright, then. Let's not dive into one thing at a time. Okay, fine. We'll go through the agenda. Let's go through the agenda. You know? So we have the big announcement, database.com. Now I'll keep going. Yep. We had the Cloud 2, as always. Marc Benioff pushing the Cloud 2 agenda, showing us the push and the pull, data being pushed at us, you're touching it. The mobile devices, he pulled out four or five mobile devices out of his pockets and an iPad out of his pants. If you hear any ambient noise, that's because we are recording live. Yes. There are six clouds now. There used to be three. This time last year there were three, then there was a fourth, adding Chatter, and then they've added the Jigsaw Data Cloud, which we saw a demonstration of during the Sales Cloud 2 demo, as well as the new database.com cloud, and they did put up a slide at the end of the keynote that had two more mystery clouds, two clouds with question marks in them. So, we'll learn about those tomorrow. We were promised the big force.com platform announcement tomorrow. So today was all about database.com as well as the core product offering sales cloud service cloud 2 and chatter. So some good stuff. I kicked off with the sales cloud and we saw some jigsaw. We saw some jigsaw live and live and in person. And integrated. And integrated. Just sort of my prediction. Well it was always integrated but now it's owned by.

03:28 Jason Atwood: owned by and fully integrated. I didn't really get that from a standpoint they were showing us. Is that still the salesforce.com, is that the Jigsaw AppExchange product that you can install? That's my bet. Or is that now gonna be just part of like there's a button in every contact called Jigsaw? Well you

Justin Edelstein: probably have, I don't know the way, Salesforce is always a little cryptic with their pricing models and their edition models. I'm not sure when you actually get jigsaw. You have to pay for it separately if it's an app that you have to license. So I assume once you have jigsaw licenses you can use it and maybe it magically shows up maybe it's an app exchange product maybe we should

Jason Atwood: do our research but this is just right after it happened so we will do a research and come back with the actual answers. This is the questions people want to know.

Justin Edelstein: But it was interesting, you saw Craig up on stage with Demo Dan, who's always the guy there doing the demos with the quick fingers, and they showed a contact that had no address information on the screen, and they had an embedded Google Map, a mashup on the contact page, and it was blank, so you could tell there was no address information. Clicked one button that went to Jigsaw to clean up the data, brought back in the address information from Jigsaw and then magically the Google Map worked. It's a pretty neat

Jason Atwood: little integration. Totally neat. It'll be interesting to see how it gets, you know, again, I know that that already exists as an AppExchange product. I don't, because I've seen it and I think I've thrown into a developer edition somewhere, but I didn't, I haven't seen it, I sort of just included as, again, a button you can drop on a page layout and it's called Jigsaw and it's there. So interesting. The other thing, you didn't run down your thing, was the prediction was true. Chatter

Justin Edelstein: went free. Free chatter. Chatter did go free. That was actually next on my list to talk about was essentially the few new things in the sales cloud that is leveraging chatter which is new, the ability to chatter on dashboard components which is interesting. Nice. I've always questioned why would you want to chatter on an entire dashboard I think going down to the component level makes a little bit more sense. It has sort of like reports and yeah it's going free. The offer is interesting it's going to be called chatter.com available in February and that will enable you to have the collaboration service and the mobile app for free. What it will allow you to also do is extend so you can either extend your existing Salesforce instance and provision as an admin you can provision every user that you want or you can allow users within your existing work to invite other people to use Chatter with them. Not sure if you're going to be able to control that by domain or how you're going to be able to do that but that was

06:33 Jason Atwood: the way that Mark explained it. So in theory any contact that I have in I could then enable them also to have chatter?

Justin Edelstein: That's what it sounded like, but we shall see how that works.

Jason Atwood: I love how there's a lot of information. This is, you know, again, my fourth year, your third year at Dreamforce, and it's a ton of information. You walk out going, God, that's all such great stuff. And then you think, wait, what did he say? Is that free? Is that what... Like, there's a lot of information, but there's not no details. Although, Chatter now has a pay version, which is the old Chatter version.

Justin Edelstein: So Chatter.com will be the free version that you can just stand up for your entire organization. You don't have to be Salesforce.com users. And then there's a seamless upgrade path to, I believe they said $15 a month per user, which is essentially the existing Chatter only license, which gives you the accounts and contacts and whatever else comes with that Chatter only license. chatter.com the free license will just give you the chatter file files feeds profiles and groups which is actually a lot it's for free that's pretty good

Jason Atwood: that's pretty good it's a great it's a great product for free it's and it's

Justin Edelstein: secure you know it's you know you know it's secure well that's actually

Jason Atwood: interesting because one of the things I was reading on it was that the chatter plus gets you enhanced security which I was joking with the other partner of our about saying that was funny because you get to pay for more security. I would never put that as a...

Justin Edelstein: I don't think that that's what it means. I think what it means is, since you'll have access to accounts and contacts, it inherits the security model of them. That's my guess. That's a better way of putting it. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: Than they had in their marketing blitz.

Justin Edelstein: They should hire me for marketing.

Jason Atwood: Wait? No. So that's, I mean, totally cool. We kind of knew that was coming. now it's Chatter Plus. I joked in Twitter that next year Chatter Plus will go free and they'll have Chatter Plus Pro. Chatter Platinum. Chatter Platinum. Chatter Plus Pro

Justin Edelstein: 2011. You got silver, gold, and platinum chatter. And they didn't put the thing

Jason Atwood: that we wanted to have happen which they didn't let knowledge, they didn't set

Justin Edelstein: knowledge. No, they did not. We were tweeting about that and that's a good segue because the next thing in the keynote that was talked about was the Service Cloud. They brought Alex Dejon up on stage from France from the company Instranet that was purchased maybe two years ago, a year and a half ago, and was into, was actually, you know, already integrated but they took the platform of Instranet and rebuilt it on the cloud. A big piece of Instranet is the knowledge base. It's a big push to use the knowledge base and nothing really new from the knowledge perspective. I thought I saw real-time filtering of search results. You know that uses the same dimensions technology that has existed throughout the product. What was interesting was actually the scripting. So that might have been new. The ability to, you know, if a user asks a question about a product and the product is, you know, laptop,

09:52 Justin Edelstein: Well that's a generic term, laptop. Which laptop? And then walk through the script essentially. Oh this laptop, this size, this model, this memory stick that they want to upgrade with. So it did do that and filter down on knowledge articles. As always they showed the ability to publish knowledge articles out to a website or a customer portal, search for it in Google and find it, attach it to a case and send it out via email, attach it through Twitter. So catching a case or catching a tweet and shoving it into a case within the Service Cloud, interacting with this

Jason Atwood: person just through Twitter. Is that still going to be the App Exchange product? It was the App Exchange product, yeah absolutely. I think

Justin Edelstein: that that is a route that they're going to continue to go down where they just have these products that exist on the AppExchange. Because, again, with their model of licensing, they have like service cloud licenses and sales cloud licenses. So you have the Enterprise Edition for both, which is weird because does one come with the other? It's very, it's a little confusing. They should probably work on that as far as making it a little bit more clear of what you're getting. Because why would you buy Service Cloud Enterprise Edition when you can buy Sales Cloud Enterprise Edition and install the thing from the AppExchange, when Service Cloud Enterprise Edition doesn't come with knowledge anyway, you have to pay for it.

Jason Atwood: I think there's something in the Service Cloud, well, it's actually a small segue after this, but I think there's something in the Service Cloud that you get as part of the license. I also think it's a lower price point, so.

Justin Edelstein: It's not, it's the same.

Jason Atwood: It's not Enterprise. It is. It is the same price.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, it might even be more. So it's hard to understand, and we do this for a living. So it's not.

Jason Atwood: And we're experts. We're experts. That really makes it, well, just a side note on that, something that came out, not of this, but here at Dreamforce was that they're now doing a new certification level for all those out there who are admins and certified developers and certified sales consultants. There's now breaking it off and creating a whole new segment just for sales cloud certification.

Justin Edelstein: And service cloud.

Jason Atwood: Sorry, and service cloud services. So breaking it out into two different clouds, which at some point, if they keep having all the clouds, and every cloud starts to get its own certification, let's see, seven clouds times two, I mean, you could have a lot of certs. Yes. I don't know how it fit at all on a business card.

Justin Edelstein: They also demonstrated the ActiveAlive search from the website. They didn't, I don't think they did the greatest job of showing off the capabilities. It might have been difficult to show all that it can do, because it is an integrated product and does integrate with a contact and a case and log the activity. But all they really showed up on stage was the ability to have a live chat on a website, which isn't all that exciting these days. But it is part of the offering. Perhaps that piece only comes with the service cloud versus the sales cloud.

13:13 Jason Atwood: What else was in the service cloud? Anything else?

Justin Edelstein: No, they showed integrated telephony, searching for articles, publishing them, attaching them, tweeting them, all the stuff that we've actually seen before, Chatter. They did show some of the entitlements features that rolled out in, I think it was the summer release, the entitlements where different service level agreements for different types of accounts, and hitting milestones, and clicking buttons, adding you know level 2 or level 3 and using chatter to collaborate around a case which is nice but for the most part they didn't really show anything brand brand new with the service cloud they just sort of gave a good overview of it

Jason Atwood: I want to get your I have a question for you I'll let you think about as we talk about this other stuff going on for Tim for today versus tomorrow do you think tomorrow's announcement announcements are gonna be bigger in scope and more game-changing than today because there are breaking up and last year we were talking about this at lunch but last year they announced chatter on the first day. I think that's because chatter then you know the show was about chatter so it had to be everywhere and had to change the signs and things like that. I have a gut feeling that tomorrow's announcements are going to be bigger in scope that are going to have more significance than database.com because there are other services out there that are doing the database, cloud service database stuff. In fact, Rackspace has one. Google has one. Google has one. So has one. Yeah, so it's big in that it's Salesforce and that it has some great features. But somehow I feel like two new clouds tomorrow, I feel like, and there's secrecy too.

Jason Atwood: We know that we've talked to a lot of our Salesforce buddies who work at Salesforce. And I'll tell you, there's an access level because some of them know and some of them don't know what's happening tomorrow. So it's not that every Salesforce employee knows what's happening tomorrow. Some of them actually have no clue. And they've said, listen, we had not even been told what's coming out. Personally, no. Today, they did know it wouldn't tell us good. Because then we would get on a podcast and tell everybody out there in the world, it should be no good.

Justin Edelstein: Well, good for our listeners. Yes, good for our listeners.

Jason Atwood: But anyway, so that's what I mean. What do you, since I asked the question, what do you think? Do you think tomorrow's going to be...

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, well, they did put two new clouds up there with question marks, and they did allude to some of the stuff like site building which leads you to believe CMS is around the corner. I don't think that yeah there's the easier ability to build out websites, easier ability to build out Visualforce declaratively and they did make mention of the platform itself being completely abstracted from the database level so you know you'll have the database as a service and then all the other components of the platform you know authentication, querying, reporting, analytics, auth as a service, auth as a service all sorts of different capabilities of the platform being delivered separately from the database so the database.com is the the you know the ground floor and and then we'll see what comes tomorrow with the with the

16:29 Jason Atwood: next two clouds. Well that's a great segue because that was sort of the big announcement that got released this morning. Interesting enough I got an email from a friend of mine, I don't know if he goes to the podcast, who doesn't know Salesforce very well. He's a big database geek though and he would say that so it's not an insult to him and he literally emailed me and said what is this database.com thing, you know, what does it have to do with Salesforce, is it really relational, you asked a bunch of questions and I thought, I don't know, I felt like to me like it had been out there for a long time. I didn't know about it So they released the website in the morning, so it wasn't really a sort of a You know they were kind of showing in advance that it was going to come But it looks really cool. I mean from a Semi database geek or as a database guy back in the day when I used to be the database guy It's they had like the thing that blew me away was the command line stuff, right? So a lot of what you do in Salesforce, you know, very much clicks, not code.

Jason Atwood: And even when you're developing in the apps, you're not using command lines, sort of Unix-based type stuff. So watching them drop to a command line, a virtual command line, and doing some SQL, I thought, ooh, that's interesting. And it's open, so a lot of things can use the API. They showed an example of basically building a recruiting app, which seems to be the number one go-to app. Although, again, I can think of some partners who might not want to have that be the app that looks like they can build in five minutes. It's generally more difficult than that. But it looked really good. What do you think about database.com?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, so some statistics. Steve Fisher, who runs a lot of the core engineering and development teams at Salesforce, came out and talked about the scalability of the database itself that's, you know, runs on or that salesforce.com runs on and said, they rebuilt it from the ground up to be a cloud to database with social built right in and the ability to do feeds and chatter and things like that built right in. Talked about there being 20 billion records in the database as opposed to 10 billion last year, which is just completely doubling in size over the course of one year.

Jason Atwood: And wasn't some huge percentage of that was not standard objects?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, a lot of it was just custom data from customers. When he said cloud to database, what he meant by that was, again, the social, the auto tuning of the database, the auto upgrades, all the things that you don't really have to think about when you're running a database in the cloud as opposed to managing it yourself on premise.

Jason Atwood: We were talking to a customer right after who was immediately saying, oh, I wish I had that six months ago so they could

Justin Edelstein: have built something in it. Built a product that they ended up using Zoho for. Oh, they did? They used Zoho. Yes, they did. But they ended up having to build, because, again, database.com is available on any platform, using any language, and on any devices. They wrote the app as a web app using PHP. They could have done that using database.com and then easily have built a mobile version for it. And that was sort of a key to that project, was they had to make sure that the website worked really well on the iPad as well as a regular web browser, but they could have built it a little bit differently perhaps if this would have been available to them. And again, some of the features in the line items of the features is relational data, search, so free text search, users, so you can provision users to the database, Row-level security, triggers and stored procedures, authentication, as well as an API.

20:22 Justin Edelstein: So it's available to access from different programs or different areas and different languages.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, so far it's the thing that I want to get my hands on the quickest. And again, you can go sign up.

Justin Edelstein: So I'm sure we're in Moscone West, which is where the Force.com developer zone is. I imagine it's upstairs somewhere. downstairs in the Cloud Dine and I imagine if we went up there... I love that you're actually looking at this... I'm looking up right now, I am. I'm looking at the asbestos filled pipes up there. If you if you were to go upstairs I bet you could get your hands on a demonstration of it right now. It looked pretty cool the way that they were adding fields and dragging the database tables around because you can see that it was like you know it's Salesforce fields you're adding a new field and it had, you know, AutoNumber or Picklist or Checkbox. It was all the Salesforce stuff, but it was in a different UI than you've ever seen before for adding a field to a Salesforce object.

Jason Atwood: It much more, I know this sounds strange to say, but it's much more like database tools exist today and that it's not, they weren't trying to take Salesforce and put the database into it. They said, let's make it separate, separate. It's its own thing. it's going to appeal to a different set of people. But I'll tell you, we both know that while Salesforce is great at certain types of data and certain relationships and certain things, there are things that you struggle with Salesforce in terms of certain types of data sets or certain volumes of data sets or trying to get things in and out because while it is a database, it is not meant to be a relational database in some way. So it doesn't behave like your traditional DB2, your PostgreSQL, your MySQL, your MS SQL, it behaves like Salesforce. And so that has some great advantages, but it also has some disadvantages. So I think this is another tool in the belt of people who want to use cloud computing to say, okay, fine, if you can't do it in Salesforce because of one of these restrictions, here's, you know, we can do it here. And it's, I would like to see, actually what I'm really interested to see is how does it integrate with Salesforce? You know, like is, if they can connect that up, because what I love to see is, I'm in Salesforce, I got all my Salesforce-y stuff, and somehow I can get to this, right, build me a way to connect that database.com stuff into Salesforce so that I can connect those two worlds.

Justin Edelstein: Well, it seems to me that the database, that database.com is what Salesforce will eventually be sitting on.

Jason Atwood: So you don't think that Salesforce is sitting on that structure right now? No. It's a whole new, you think it's a whole new offering?

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, but I think eventually it will be the core database that Salesforce sits on, but that is a massive conversion that, you know, being a cloud offering, you don't go down. You don't say, we're gonna migrate our 85, 90,000 customers and three, four million users and 20 billion records to a new database overnight.

23:32 Jason Atwood: We'll be down from August. We'll see you in September. Yeah, exactly.

Justin Edelstein: So that's a trick that they'll have to pull off, but I think eventually that database.com is the database that Salesforce will be sitting on. Again, the clues were there. We're abstracting a lot of these things. We're giving them to you as tools to use as part of the tool set as a service. So with that, why don't we get to predictions for tomorrow and then wrap this puppy up. Alright. What do you think is coming down the pipe tomorrow?

Jason Atwood: Well, there's two things we know. We know that, we know the sites thing. So there's a visual, a visual kind of a whizzy wig developer for sites. Drag and drop, what we've been asking for. You know, I'm a big website guy, I've been building websites for some million years. And I love sites because of the sum of its ability, the CDN and things like that. But it lacks in content management, doesn't have really good content management built into it.

Justin Edelstein: No, you're building pages and linking them together.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, so it doesn't have a lot of that. And the sort of, the customization of it, the WheezyWig stuff. So I know that's coming tomorrow, so it's not much of a prediction.

Justin Edelstein: What are the two clouds?

Jason Atwood: I think one's a site cloud. Site's cloud? Website cloud? Website cloud. cloud? I have a guess. I think it's a content management cloud. Okay. What's your guess? So I think you're right on

Justin Edelstein: the content management cloud. I think a content management cloud is one and I think the other one is a data analytics business intelligence cloud. Ooh, that'd be hot. Where they're gonna have advanced analytics availability because right now analytics are still a little lacking but again, piggybacking on the database.com announcement, it seems as though more advanced analytics will be available due to the nature of the database that it will be sitting on. So go for the full

Jason Atwood: prediction. What's the cloud name? Analytics Cloud? Yeah, I think it'll be

Justin Edelstein: Content Cloud and Business Intelligence Cloud. I think there's a Sites Cloud and

Jason Atwood: then I don't know what the other one is. But yours is as good as Guess's any. They're just

Justin Edelstein: guesses guys. Until tomorrow we won't know. Alright, so that's gonna wrap us up

Jason Atwood: for day one here at Dreamforce. You want to follow us. If you are looking for the t-shirts we are going to have them. We're gonna announce it again tomorrow in the in the chatter Dreamforce app and on Twitter and we might even wear them around so be easy to find us and as a way to get to us we have them here all those are on it for the you don't know talk about for the for this teacher we had t-shirt contest at Dreamforce so if you listen to this in two years it's not that'd be much to you. But until then, tomorrow we'll be back so we'll just sign it off right now. blog.arcusinc.com, twitter.com slash arcusinc, twitter.com slash just edelstein, twitter.com slash Jason M. Atwood and subscribe on iTunes which is always a great way. Until tomorrow, keep on dreaming buddy.