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Dreamforce 2010 review

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Last week, the cloud computing event of the year hit San Francisco with a mighty force and as a company with more than a passing interest in Salesforce.com, Dreamforce was of huge interest to us (we watched online along with a host of other people.)

Thousands of people joined together to innovatively learn about the future of computing and how it can successfully transfer their business into this new era of the second cloud. Through connecting with others, inspirational talks and practical seminars, Dreamforce aimed to provide the complete package to get your company ahead of the game.

Undoubtedly a highlight of the conference was the networking opportunities (for those who were there), with over 20,000 like-minded people; Dreamforce was the perfecting hunting ground for forging new, long-lasting friendships and business relationships.

This year the Dreamforce App was introduced which made networking more effective and concentrated. By updating you attendee profile on the App, conference goers were able to meet, greet and gain information from people specialising in specific topic areas of interest. After all, Dreamforce is about community innovation and so building exciting business relationships was central to the conference.

Bill Clinton joined to tell of his experience at being a president in changing times. He gave insight into his views on globalisation and the worlds growing independence. Having led a country into enormous economic growth and prosperity, Bills inspirational talk gave vision and also practical application theory leaving us with plenty to chew on and consider implementing back in our own company. Whatever your background, this presentation gave us all something to think about.

Then Dreamforce got practical. With over thirty hands on workshops, from ‘Have It Your Way: Customize Your Org to Fit Your Business’ to ‘Driving Collaboration with Chatter,’ there was a program to suit every need and answer every question. The sessions encompassed the most up to date information as well as workable strategies and tips for your business, in order that you were enabled to leave with the relevant skills needed for moving forward.

Finally, Stevie Wonder, the man who is practically the definition of success, topped everything off by performing some of his most famous songs at the Global Gala getting everyone to their feet dancing and singing along – if you were there anyway.

All in all, a very successful time seemed to be had by all and we most certainly came away (virtually) with lots to think about and lots to mull over.


More people will hand in their notice this week than during any other week

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Today we released figures to the National press showing that more employees will hand in their notice this week than during any other week in the year.

The full press release is below.  We’d love to hear your thoughts on this, or if you’re going through a similar situation yourself.

Press Release

Figures from Cloud Recruitment Company ‘Resource on Demand’ were released today and show that more employees will hand in their notice this week than during any other week of the year, with a staggering 37% of the years total transpiring this week alone.

Year on Year statistics gathered by Resource on Demand show that 37% of resignations occur in the third week of September and 24% happen during the first week of February. Both of these bouts occur 4-weeks after the end of traditional holiday seasons.

This research also shows that whilst many career changes are triggered following these key holiday periods, it takes candidates on average 4 weeks to job hunt and attend interviews, then a further 4 weeks to work their notice – meaning that the majority of post-summer resignations only start their new roles at the beginning of November.

Lee Durrant, MD of Resource on Demand, said:

“This week will see hundreds of thousands of people handing in their notice across the UK & Ireland. The catalyst is often the Summer break, people return from their time away looking to progress or alter their career path. After mulling it over on a beach, job hunting, applying, interviewing and working their notice, many candidates will naturally opt to this week hand in their notice and so a ‘merry-go-round’ of the jobs market will begin”.

A recent (July 2010) study by the Institute of Leadership and Management has revealed that 40% of workers do not in actua fact return from their holidays feeling more relaxed.

Lee Durrant added:

“It is incredible that over half of all new jobs are triggered by the two key holiday seasons, but in many ways it is also unsurprising. The time away from our desks helps us to consider our options and evaluate our careers. Our advice is that if you are not enjoying your job, maybe it is time to look for a role that you will enjoy. This may include training to reach that goal, but it is worth the time that you invest into it.”

Resource On Demand (ROD) is a market leader in providing recruitment services on a subscription basis to the salesforce.com and Cloud Computing industry. Assisting companies looking to recruit talented people with salesforce.com experience and certification on permanent, contract or temporary assignments.


Cloudforce 2010 highlights

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Tim Anderson is a highly regarded freelance Technology journalist, he was in attendance at Cloudforce 2010 and put together this article, of which the rest can be found on his Technology blog ITwriting.com…

“I’m attending the Cloudforce conference inwidel London to catch up on what’s new with the Salesforce.com platform.

CEO Marc Benioff was on good form, with a fun slide in his keynote presentation saying “Beware of the false cloud” – this was a jab at private clouds which he considers lack the advantages of a multi-tenanted public cloud platform like, you know, Salesforce.com. He has some justification – operating your own cloud is clearly a significant IT burden to carry – but that is the price of freedom. His company continues to report impressive growth. The theme this year is Salesforce.com Chatter, a Twitter-like service embedded into the platform, for which there are just-announced mobile clients (Apple iOS, Blackberry, Android coming) as well as integration with the web UI and programmable platform.

Chatter is reducing email usage for adopters, apparently; Benioff says by 40% in his own company. Another of its advantages (aside from general social media goodness) is that users cannot attach documents directly, but only links to documents – pass by reference not by value – which is a better approach to collaboration. Of course you can do this in emails as well, but people habitually do not. It makes you think – maybe the likes of Outlook should do this by default, saving no end of space in corporate mailboxes. Or perhaps we should just use Chatter instead.”

To read the rest of this article, please visit Tim’s blog.

If you were at Cloudforce we would love to hear what you enjoyed about it. If you found yourself hearing about the cloud for the first time and would like to chat with us about a career as a salesforce.com consultant, force.com developer or becoming certified either phone us on 020 8123 7769 or email us: rod@resourceondemand.com


Cloudforce 2010 – Register Now

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It’s that time of the year again. The salesforce.com team are in town and are all set to host Cloudforce 2010 in London.

For those that are new to the Cloud or salesforce.com, Cloudforce is an annual event that allows you to ‘Experience at first hand, the mobile, collaborative and social innovations that are driving the Cloud 2 revolution.’

Join salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and cloud leaders VMware and BMC for the enterprise-computing event of the year. Hear from customers who are adopting Chatter in their business to drive collaboration and increase productivity across their sales and service teams, and the entire enterprise.

It might be that through ROD you’ve been introduced to the Cloud, or that you’re looking to move in that direction. Whichever scenario you’re in then attending Cloudforce would be a great event for you.

Registration is free (but space is limited). Some key elements will include:

See the latest cloud breakthroughs—featuring live demonstrations from companies that are using cloud computing, Chatter, the Sales Cloud, the Service Cloud, and Force.com to lead their industries and grow their business.

Learn how Chatter boosts CRM adoption and productivity of sales and service professionals

Hear how companies are using Chatter across the enterprise to break-down business silos and create collaborative companies

Discover how to make custom applications collaborative and social with just a few clicks

Test drive the latest cutting-edge applications from salesforce.com and our partners

Lunch is included. And you can top off your day by networking 1:1 with cloud computing experts, salesforce.com customers, and partners in our Cloud Expo.

Register by clicking here

If you would like to meet up with any of the ROD team to discuss a career in the cloud, job prospects or training, then please email rod@resourceondemand.com and we can arrange to meet with you.


Facebook to use Chatter

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In one of the more interesting news stories of last week, salesforce.com announced that they had signed Facebook as a CRM customer.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff talked so much about the Facebook imperative that he landed the social networking giant as a customer.

Salesforce.com said Wednesday that it has landed Facebook as a CRM customer for its sales operation. Under the deal, Facebook will use Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud 2. The system is deployed.

With the move Facebook gets access to Salesforce.com’s Chatter, which is designed to be the Facebook of the enterprise.

Salesforce.com Chatter

In fact, Facebook and Chatter already look like they were separated at birth.

“Salesforce.com lands Facebook as a customer” was originally published at ZDNet.


Salesforce.com Makes Forbes’ List of the 100 Most Trustworthy Companies

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This week Forbes confirmed what we’ve long since known, that salesforce.com is not only one of the best companies around, but that they are also ethical, responsible and trustworthy, as they enter Forbes’ list of the 100 most trustworthy companies.

Most notably, salesforce.com was ranked amongst the top 10 of the most trustworthy large-cap companies. The annual list, compiled by independent financial

analytics company Audit Integrity, is made up of the American businesses that have consistently demonstrated transparent and solid corporate governance and management.

“It is a tremendous honor to make Forbes’ List of the 100 Most Trustworthy Companies,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “Business transparency is incredibly important to our organization and we are therefore extremely proud of this accomplishment.”

At Resource on Demand we very much enjoy partnering with salesforce.com in their foundation scheme, which according to their website has given 192,972 volunteer hours, 8,539 donated and discounted licenses and $20,190,348 to enable positive and social change.

Our involvement with the foundation is set to reach new heights soon, so watch this space, but we are immensely proud to work in an ecosystem that has such a positive reputation.

If you want to work within the ecosystem as well, we can assist you in training and placing you with the right organisation for you, just contact us on 020 8123 7769 or email us using rod@resourceondemand.com and we’ll get you started.


9 Tips to Cracking the Cloud

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We’re always being asked how candidates can ‘get into the cloud’, so here’s our top tips, but don’t just pick one, go through all of them and if you really want to work in the salesforce.com ecosystem – do as many of these as you can.  It will pay off.

1.  Do not underestimate the effect of demonstrating enthusiasm and persistence when attempting to break into the salesforce.com ecosystem. Do online training, get certified, push yourself into the salesforce.com world.

2.  Try and identify areas of salesforce.com technologies and features that you are not aware of and learn about them. See what experienced salesforce.com Consultants and Developers are talking about on forums such as this one.

3.  Be prepared to attend events, and when you do attend don’t just shuffle around on your own – Network, Network, Network!

4.  Continue networking online, through Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Viadeo.

5.  Relationships are very important in the salesforce.com ecosystem as it is currently very close knit – so your reputation and history will follow you!

6.  Be prepared to start building from the ground up, remember, 3 months is a long time in this industry and progression can be swift.

7.  There is a wide cultural range of consulting partners for salesforce.com, find the organisations that you would like to work with and tell the recruiter that you are dealing with.

8.  Also, be willing to get involved and possibly keep your expectations on salary flexible – at least until you have proved your worth to your employer.

9. Offer yourself to ROD’s Volunteer programme. If you have the time, ROD can help you in offering your services to a charity organisation that uses salesforce.com. This will give you some real world salesforce.com exposure and provide you with a salesforce.com recognised project to put on your CV.


Chatter: How good is it really?

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It’s now four months since salesforce.com announced the private beta launch of Chatter and many people have been experimenting with their new Cloud Collaboration tool, so how good is Chatter, really?

Chatter was hailed as revolutionary when it was unveiled at Dreamforce in November 2009.

Salesforce.com describe Chatter as a collaboration tool that allows you to stay on top of what’s happening in your company with real-time updates on people and groups, important documents, and your top deals and accounts.

After playing, experimenting and testing Chatter, it wouldn’t be unjustified to describe it as a game changer, through allowing you to connect with co-workers, projects and accounts in a way that increases productivity and inter-work efficiency.

Imagine being able to see what colleagues are working on, being able to answer their questions within Chatter without your inbox being bombarded with ‘request emails’, only reading and contributing your thoughts to relevant topics and all in a Facebook style with short updates and then follow-up comments (which also allows attachments.) This is the future of real-time collaboration and it comes in the shape of Chatter.

The initial concern was that it was another communication tool that would distract from tangible work; however anecdotal evidence and first-hand experience is that your inbox will begin to get quieter, whilst your productivity and input from colleagues will increase.

Marc Benioff said that: “We are in the era of Cloud 2, where social networking use has surpassed e-mail, Facebook and YouTube use have outpaced search, and new mobile devices like the iPad are creating entirely new ways to interact with information”.

You shouldn’t embrace Cloud 2 because it’s the new buzzword, you should embrace it because it will benefit your business.


The birth of VMforce

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ROD was on line last night with over 3000 other viewers watching the VMforce announcement that saw salesforce.com firmly link arms with VMware.

For those of you who may have missed the announcement, VMforce will be deployed on top of Force.com and use Spring Framework making it possible for developers to run enterprise Java applications on Salesforce.com, in order to drive enterprise application development.

This move was born out of necessity in order for salesforce to compete with the likes of Google or Amazon and for VMware to firmly stake its claim within the ‘Cloud’. Will this strategic move mean that salesforce will be able to match the likes of Amazon to become the enterprise Java PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) leader?

We will be interested to hear your thoughts and views on the emergence of VMforce and what this could mean for the face of cloud applications.

If you missed the webcast you can view it online here: http://www.salesforce.com/video/vmforce-launch-sf.jsp


Configuration vs Coding

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We have often been asked by candidates what do our clients think is the best approach and our answer is usually that neither is right nor wrong. Each method has its own benefits and characteristics.

Configuration can often be the quickest and cheapest way of providing a quick fix solution, although the down side is that whilst it gets the ball rolling (so to speak) it might not always do everything that you want it to. Configuration, if done well is a good place to start and can offer a good level of functionality, but if not carefully designed at the outset could lead to issues when trying to expand functionality or processes at a later date.

Coding a solution on the other hand, provides a ‘blank canvas’ approach making ‘anything’ possible, but it can lead to a lengthy and much more costly solution. Whilst development of a solution using an ‘Agile’ approach can help towards mitigating the size of development projects and in turn cost, ongoing enhancements usually require more resources and budget then configuration.

In essence your assessment of whether to opt for either the ‘coding’ or ‘configuration route’, should clearly take into account all factors, such as required functionality versus budget versus time frames versus short, mid or long term future evolution. And key to getting it right is to ensure that time is taken over requirements gathering and design of the businesses processes, before making your decision.