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It began with a dance number from rapper MC Hammer and proceedings wrapped up with talk of Salesforce.com Founder and CEO heading into space with Sir Richard Branson.  Along the way was a whole host of new product announcements that take the cloud industry pioneer one giant leap ahead of its competitors.

With more than 90,000 people registered for the event and Howard Street temporarily turned into "Dreamforce Plaza" complete with lawn, Dreamforce 2012 always promised to be a remarkable experience and the first day's events certainly seem to bare that out.  But first to the news:

  • Chatter Box: described as "Dropbox for the enterprise" this cloud storage service provides simple, secure and social file sharing across the enterprise.
  • The Marketing Cloud: the combination of @Radian6 and @BuddyMedia finally and officially unveiled - the world's most complete suite for Social Marketing.
  • Work.com: making HR Social - brings the acquisition of @Rypple together with partnerships with Workday and Amazon to make performance, motivation and alignment easier to manage in a Social way.
  • Salesforce Identity: a "Facebook-like Identity for the enterprise" solves the log-in problem cloud experience has often been hindered by with a single, social, trusted identity in the cloud across all enterprise apps.
  • Salesforce Touch Platform - for developers to write-once applications in HTML5 making them immediately and out-of-the-box iOS and Android friendly for a new mobile world.

Its worth popping by the Salesforce.com Press Room for all the details as that's not all that was annouonced.  Or, you can watch the Keynotes on You Tube and get the news from the Horses Mouth:

Reception of the news in the region has already been widespread.  For instance, NBR's Chris Keal - a guest of Salesforce in San Francisco - was able to grab some quick local reaction to the news.  He got immediate reactions from Commonwealth Bank CMO, Andy Lark, (who spoke about his use of Chatter and Radian6 at Cloudforce Sydney in June) as well as New Zealand-based Cloud analyst @BenKepes - pre-briefed on the Marketing Cloud - who told Chris:

“At every turn we see Salesforce deliver the glue that ties together their formerly disconnected individual services."

Ben Kepes has filed his own reaction to the first day's events already, at his blog here: "Salesforce becomes the first next generation enterprise platform".

The day-time proceedings rounded up with a quite illuminating and inspiring fire-side chat between Marc Benioff and @RichardBranson - the video for which will be online very soon.  The wide ranging conversation touched not only only on business leadership but on social issues, politics and the environment - finishing up with the news that Marc Benioff has already bought his ticket to space!  

For more on the show, stay tuned to this blog, in the meantime - could this be the quote of the day?