dreamforce

The pervasive cloud touches us personally almost constantly in one form or another, and that’s equally true in the enterprise, where trends such as BYOD and cloud-based collaboration have connected us at a level we never would have guessed even a few years ago. Dreamforce attendees will be in for four days of discussions around these current cloud computing trends and get a chance to discuss the changes in cloud computing ahead of us. Since this marks the 10th Dreamforce, I have to wonder if there will be much in the way of looking back and talking about the olden days of Salesforce.com and the cloud.

Of course, back at Dreamforce 2002, there couldn’t have been even a hint as to how big the event would become. A five-year-old post on the VerticalResponse AppExchange blog reminisced the first Dreamforce, which had a whopping attendance of seven partners. How times have changed.

“Salesforce.com will unveil the latest innovations that will allow attendees to transform into social enterprises and connect with customers, partners and employees like never before to drive growth,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), in a prepared statement during the announcement of this year’s conference.

Attendees can look forward to more than 750 sessions and more than 350 cloud companies in the expo. No doubt many of the sessions will be talking about the next generation of cloud and how it have an impact on the enterprise and on the channel partners making it happen.

Salesforce.com has secured several high-profile speakers, including Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts, Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson, General Electric chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt, retired General Colin L. Powell, entrepreneur and author Tony Robbins, Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and president of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, and Dr. Larry Brilliant, physician and philanthropist. Oh yeah, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers will perform.

Now that’s what I call a Dream Team.