Work and Play at Dreamforce 2015

Bill May recounts his experience at Dreamforce 2015, and offers a special invitation to those who missed the show—or those who just want to relive it!

“Work hard. Play hard.”

That phrase is probably clichéd and overused, but it’s oh so accurate for Dreamforce. Such was the case last week for the 150,000 of us who made the trek to San Francisco for Salesforce’s yearly conference.

The Work

For those who could not attend, I offer this glimpse of what you missed.

Data connectivity and integration is often no more than a checkbox in major products, and often gets overlooked. Imagine my delight at finding such a receptive audience at Dreamforce. Our message of “Any Data, Any App, in Real-Time” resonated really well alongside the buzz surrounding Salesforce Lightning Connect.

We hosted two sessions in the Innovation Theater on our Lightning Connect story.

First, our resident Data Evangelist, Sumit Sarkar, walked the audience through his experience developing a proof-of-concept implementation of Lightning Connect earlier this year.

The next day, systems engineer Idaliz Baez took the stage with Vamsi Vasireddy from Intuit to tell the story of our recent work getting over 6,000 of Intuit’s Salesforce users real-time visibility into their legacy Siebel data.

Both sessions were a huge success, and really brought home how monumental a development Lightning Connect has been.

The Play

Okay, that’s the work—but I also mentioned play, right?

Dreamforce outdoes itself each year by putting on great concerts for the attendees, and this year was no different. Music and entertainment was easily found in any of the venues taken over by Dreamforce or wherever it happened to spill out into the streets. I personally enjoyed rocking out to this year’s headlining band, The Foo Fighters.

We got into the spirit too, asking attendees to show us—and share with whomever they’d like—their data style at our booth in Moscone West. You can find a ton of these posted on our Facebook page.

Keep the party rolling

We’re still riding the wave of Dreamforce 2015, and next week we’re hosting two webinars to share all the great stuff we learned with those of you who couldn’t make it or just want a refresher. The first, on September 29th, will be hosted by Idaliz Baez who will be highlighting some of the best moments from Dreamforce as well as talking about the awesome cloud connectivity solutions we demonstrated at the show. The next day on September 30th, Tim Coste will be hosting a special presentation that will show you how to get the most out of your Salesforce data with data connectors from DataDirect.

I hope you’ll be able to join us. Oh, and by the way, we have a ton of swag still left from the show. Send me an email at bmay@progress.com and I’ll see if I can find a t-shirt for you!