News from the Salesforce Spring ‘07 keynote

I’m here at the Salesforce Spring ‘07 keynote. Lindsey Armstrong kicked things off by speaking about the growing on-demand industry. Demand for on-demand is high, and growing. Interestingly EMEA is experiencing a slightly higher growth than the US (52%). Of course on-demand is a disruptive and Lindsey appears to be quite confident that Salesforce is going to ride the wave.

I spoke to a number of customers in the “on-demand expo/breakfast” hall before the keynote, and of course they were all pretty positive too. “Customers want innovation, not infrastructure” – and that’s certainly something I saw from many of the partners.

Next up was Parker Harris – Founder & EVP, Technology. 550 applications on appexchange, answering one of my questions. (It’s little over a year old) He also spoke about appstore, making it easier to purchase the applications on appexchange.

Salesforce.com are developing a nice little ecosystem: Customers provide input via IdeaExchange, Developers participate in ADN, Salesforce.com provides the platform (Apex), and a marketplace (AppExchange), Commerce facilities to sell and use items in the marketplace (AppStore) – all centered around “availability/performance” provided by Salesforce.com of course.

Parker said something like “Coming soon and you’ll see more as my developers write the code”. Something that strikes me about Salesforce.com is how they have really embraced the “perpetual beta” that Tim O’Reilly talks about as a characteristic of the whole web 2.0 movement.

The winter release happened only a few months ago, and now we’re on the spring one (as it snows outside). That’s pretty dynamic and exciting – and of course because it’s all hosted all of the customers here in the hall have already upgraded.

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