So for the first question, let me start by pointing you to Nancy Jamison’s write up on the event, "Plenty for the Contact Center at Dreamforce ’11." A great summary. Thanks, Nancy. So how did they pull it off? Is it the San Francisco venue (they outgrew Moscone and had to hold some sessions in adjacent hotels)? Was it Metallica as the entertainment (I skipped that one)? Was it Marc Benioff’s stage presence (not to mention his who’s who of on-stage friends)? I really don’t know. Sure Salesforce is hot, but this is a single vendor-centric event primarily in the CRM space — yet they get 40,000 people!
How about the second question…Why isn’t there a communications event like this? Nancy Jamison likens it to telecom shows of past decades, but those are gone. To our good friends at Enterprise Connect and IT Expo, you’re probably the biggest comm industry shows in North America, but still a fraction of the size of Dreamforce. Our communications industry is hundreds of times bigger than the Salesforce base, but…well I don’t get it.
So…where does this leave us? My hat goes off to Benioff and crew for an amazing event. And I commit to help in whatever way I can to help drive the same level of enthusiasm in our market. Ah, but wait…maybe our market is the same as the Salesforce market. Maybe the CRM space and the UC space and the contact center space are one. Maybe customers are looking for complete solutions to better service their customers and communications is a key part of all that. Maybe…
What do you think?
Joe Staples, CMO and Dreamforce fan
Joe Staples
I was fortunate enough to join Interactive Intelligence in January of 2005 as senior vice president of worldwide marketing (an overly long title that barely fits on one line of my business card) and since that time have managed our corporate and product marketing/management groups, as well as our public relations efforts. I spend the majority of my time in the world of branding, advertising, lead generation, product strategy, and media/analyst relations. I’ve been at this for more than 25 years with experience in technology and marketing, including assignments in the areas of contact centers, computer telephony, unified messaging, mobile wireless, computer networking, and computer-based education.
For communications to take the same leap, you would need companies and shows that were willing to brand as "business transformation" and be able to talk the talk on an enterprise-wide level.
I’d like to say that there are a number of Comms companies ready to pick up that mantle, but I still get a lot of blank stares when I bring this up even after three years of aligning comms to business because communications has traditionally been so hardware, operations, transactions, and IT-oriented that it still struggles with business value. Ironically, the technical capabilities are already there to provide the value; it’s the alignment to line-of-business goals and metrics that are missing.
Until the Comms industry as a whole starts caring about the rest of the business, we’re not going to have a Dreamforce-like event in this industry. But I was there as well and even though I’m a Comms analyst, I thought it was a creative and interesting show as well.