Overheard in the Dreamforce Chat Stream…

If you’re going to Dreamforce 2010, you need to register right away to experience a new level of conference collaboration and community. It really is amazing. You can join and create groups and instantly interact with like-minded customers, partners, prospects and of course Salesforce employees. The implementation of Chatter has truly made it like Facebook for the vast Salesforce community and ecosystem. Kudos to Tom Wong and the Dreamforce team for adding a ton of value to the conference well before people actually arrive!

So why the plug for Dreamforce Chatter, you ask? Well, I thought I’d share a few discussions from today that are relevant to topics frequently discussed on the In(tegrate) the Clouds blog.

1) In response to this article: Marketing Technologies Bypass IT (posted by Kendall Collins, CMO @ Salesforce), the following comment was made:

“Most Marketers have never bought infrastructure and don’t have the experience required to deploy game changing technology. Easy-to-use, inexpensive and quick to deploy become the decision criteria versus secure, reliable, scalable, customizable, integrateable, adaptable to our business process, global reach, post sale support, education, proven results, financial viability, experience, best pratice expertise and innovation.”

This response certainly highlights the on-going cloud politics that exist in many organizations. Memories of the early days of “no software” anyone?

2) Speaking of different perspectives, this one struck me:

“I’m starting to think that interoperability, rather than integration, will be the next leap.”

I think this is a topic for another post, but my quick take on it is that I don’t think it’s a question of either / or.  With growing adoption of cloud-based services, there will continue to be a need for composite mashups with single sign-on, etc. but the need for the illusive “one truth” across systems doesn’t go away.  In terms of enterprise architecture trends, there is growing demand for SOA-based data services that incorporate data federation and data quality technologies with more traditional approaches to data integration. There’s also increased demand for flexible approaches to master data management (MDM). How much of MDM moves the to cloud over time will be interesting to follow – see poll results on this topic here.

But I digress…

My point is that if you’re going to be in San Francisco from December 6th-9th, I encourage you to join the Dreamforce conversation today! It truly is tradeshow 2.0.

I look forward to chatting with you soon.