Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference was held in San Francisco the week of December 6-9, 2010. EDL, a gold sponsor for the second year. The booth included contortionists dressed in cloud morph suits which drew continuous large crowds. At the booth, EDL representatives were discucssing and demonstrating the new CloudCraze 2.0 and Service Cloud 2 integration for prospective customers. We attracted many conference attendees to our booth and had the opportunity to “WOW”them with our eCommerce and customer service offerings.

The energy of the event was immense and intense and the convention center was packed with both current salesforce.com customers and prospects who were eager to learn more about taking full advantage of their CRM system and learning about the power of saleforce.com’s Force.com development platform. The attendees at this conference were truly eager to learn all that there was to know about salesforce.com and cloud computing. While  talking to and observing many of the attendees, I  found that there were basically two types of attendees at this event:

Group A: This group represents the customers who view saleforce.com solely as a CRM system, with their company utilizing it strictly to communicate and manage their customer information. After speaking with numerous customers in this group, I found that many of them still shared a common need – to have visibility between their leads and their sales and support centers.

Group B: These are the customers who truly want understand all that salesforce.com offers and are excitedly looking for what they can “DO next” in terms of applications and sales force optimization.

When people from Group B approached the booth and I would demonstrate CloudCraze 2.0 or Service Cloud 2 integration for them, they were in awe. They truly understood the benefit of having one “repository” for all pertinent aspects for their company from lead generation to order fulfillment and then onto the service center, with the Service Cloud 2 offering. The enterprise-class customers were shocked with the short time required to build, having experienced how long it took to build solutions this robust with an on-premise solution.

As I dive deeper into solution architecture, it is easy to understand why one would want a single portal to control all of a company’s information since the integration of information is often difficult and trying. It is also problematic to maintain so many moving parts, which must all be working together toward a common end goal. It becomes apparent that it is also quite costly and inefficient to train employees on so many different platforms.

Another common theme that I noticed as I began to truly ponder CloudCraze, EDL Consulting’s eCommerce solution built natively on Force.com, was that many companies which are product companies by nature, were beginning to develop “light” versions of their own product on Force.com as well. However, they were not prepared to take the plunge and holistically develop their product on the platform in its entirety, but instead were developing smaller versions for the AppExchange. What this suggests is customer interest in native Force.com applications. Each company that I spoke with who had developed this lighter version of their product, discussed the road map for their AppExchange product and in essence, how it would/could become as robust as an enterprise-class product.

It seems most logical to me that a consulting company with ten years of deep eCommerce experience be the ones to develop a product to derive the benefits in both development and implementation. The need for natively built applications is continuing to grow and as other eCommerce solutions begin to develop their “shopping carts” into more robust solutions, CloudCraze will continue to develop strategically, remaining ahead of the curve.