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GUEST POST: In Australia there are few greater supporters of salesforce.com and the Social Enterprise vision than Proquest Consulting's Andy Pattinson (@APACloud).  Andy is a passionate believer in the Cloud and its Social, Mobile and Open tennets.  Andy attended Dreamforce last year and got significant value from it and so this year wanted to encourage others to make the same investment.  Here are his top ten reasons to make the trip to San Francisco in September - worth taking notes:

 

As salesforce partners we’re passionate about everything salesforce, from sales cloud to service cloud, Force.com to Heroku but if there is one thing we look forward to every year more than anything it’s Dreamforce.

With Cloudforce just over a month ago and still fresh in the memory we think it’s important not to waste anytime and get ready for salesforce’s mega event of the year in San Francisco. With only 60 days to go to Dreamforce 10 here are my top 10 reasons to book your ticket for Dreamforce and experience an event like you’ve never seen before:

10 - The partner expo is an incredible place to learn all about the salesforce eco-system, the Appechange comes to life with all of salesforce’s partners showcasing their products and services with an incredible buzz. Learn about all the amazing products you can use to extend your use of salesforce like Conga, Marketo and OrchestraCMS.

9 - A really good Australian contingent travels every year, the Aussies have an amazing reputation at Dreamforce, San Francisco really is a home away from home for the week. We have many events where we all get together so you never feel too far away from Oz, you get to make great friends and have a lot of fun along the way.

8 - Take the opportunity to get certified, learn more about salesforce, take the exams and improve your knowledge, Train the Crowd a local Australian leader in salesforce training are running sessions so there is no reason not to.

7 - Learn from your peers, from world leading organisations and salesforce partners delivering industry changing projects. To see some of the amazing examples rolled out during the course of Dreamforce will fill you with incredible ideas for how you can improve your business, beat your competitors and become a social enterprise.

6 - Developer camp ground, we highly recommend you visit the developer campground to learn about the amazing things you can do with the salesforce platform, with Heroku and all of the great tools the community work with.

5 - Incredible breakout sessions, the agenda for this years sessions is going to be bigger and better than ever, there will be many amazing topics on everything from application development to user training and everything in between, in fact the biggest problem is juggling your agenda to fit everything in.

4 - Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Why wouldn’t you want to see one of the biggest bands of the last 20 years headline the main evening!

3 - If the Chilli Peppers aren’t your thing there are many amazing parties to go and socialise with your collegues, partners and salesforce staff, it’s a great opportunity to let your hair down in the evenings and discuss the amazing things you’ve learnt each day.  

2 - Great speakers, from Gen. Colin Powell to Tony Robbins, Jeff Immelt to Richard Branson you’re sure to learn amazing things from some of the leading lights in their field, whats not to love about that?

1 - The Dreamforce Keynote sessions are like nothing else (Get a sense of last year's keynote here) , from the minute you sit down in the main auditorium for the warm up session you know you’re in for a treat, @PeterCoffee does an amazing job interviewing attendees and warming up the audience for a keynote that never disappoints. Then it’s time for the main event with Marc @Benioff...who know’s what this years event will unleash!  I’ll be there...will you?

Andy-Professional_reasonably_smallAndy Pattinson is Commercial Director at Proquest Consulting, a cloud computing & social media evangelist. with a passion for helping business achieve rapid & strategic change through the use of cloud computing.