Developers in UK and Europe who crave the opportunities of social and mobile application markets should circle May 22 on the calendar – and make their plans to be in London for Cloudstock 2012, a free one-day event at London’s ExCeL Center for tomorrow’s builders of The Social Enterprise.

Cloud-based platforms are today’s only credible option for entering new markets, and creating new value for current customers, at competitive speed and with all the power of both public and private social networks. Companies reaching out to their customers are finding them on Facebook and Twitter, and distilling their conversations into actionable insights using tools like Radian6; organizations seeking to make best use of internal talent are finding collaborative agility, combined with rock-solid governance, in the combination of Salesforce Chatter with the proven applications and platform capabilities of salesforce.com. Cloudstock is the place where developers will get the perspective, and have hands-on opportunity to build the skills, required to pursue these potentials.

For more than two years now, I’ve been seeing the size of these events double at more than a Moore’s-Law rate. In San Francisco, New York, London, and other major cities, attendance at salesforce.com events has been doubling and even tripling year-on-year – because this is no longer just a conversation about modernizing and economizing IT. This is a conversation about the transformation of companies to meet the demands of the most connected, most interactive, most mobile customers the world has ever seen. This isn’t a matter of getting ahead of those customers; it’s more about trying to keep up with their rapidly rising expectations. Only the high productivity of platforms like Force.com, and the huge scalability of established skills in environments like Heroku, can make that a viable goal.

I’ve been working with developer communities on desktop machines, early Web platforms, and today’s modern multi-tenant platforms for three decades: I know that without developers’ energy and enthusiasm, any other strengths that a platform might have are pretty much irrelevant. That’s why nothing matters more to me than meeting as many developers as I can at Cloudstock, and finding out what might still be slowing their adoption of the full-spectrum platform portfolio that salesforce.com can offer them today.

The operative word is “today.” There are lots of marketing messages out there in the world, executing much better as slide shows than they do as actual opportunities for global deployment of innovative apps. Everything you’ll see at Cloudstock is real, and the energy of a Cloudstock event is contagious and compelling; that’s why you should plan to be in London two weeks from today.