Colin Powell, Cloud Computing, and a Tale of Two Conferences

This week I attended Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce Global Gathering in San Francisco and heard Colin Powell’s keynote in an audience of 8,000 people late Thursday afternoon, the last full day of the conference. It was interesting to hear the man who was secretary of state under George W. Bush, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H. W. Bush, and national security advisor to Ronald Reagan talk about studying data processing in 1969; placing his first cell-phone call in 1979 using Motorola CEO Robert Galvin’s phone; watching his son become chairman of the FCC; and now serving as a strategic limited partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the renowned Silicon Valley venture capital firm that funded companies such as Amazon.com, America Online, Citrix Systems, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Lotus Development, Macromedia, Netscape, Palm, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, Symantec, Tandem, Visio, and Verisign. Powell underscored the resilience and innovation that made the United States a great nation, and that cloud computing is the next generation of innovation in computing.

In his keynote at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff unveiled new Salesforce services such as Salesforce Chatter, which brings microblogging capabilities similar to Twitter and Facebook to enterprise collaboration, Sales Cloud 2, and Service Cloud 2. As part of the keynote he shared with Colin Powell, Marc Benioff presented a check for $2 million to the University of California San Francisco to help build a new children’s hospital. The award honors Colin Powell, who supported the launch of the Salesforce.com Foundation 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, at Interop in New York, executives of storied tech companies Cisco Systems and Citrix Systems heralded the arrival of cloud computing in their keynote speeches. According to an InformationWeekarticle by Paul McDougall, “Interop: IT Forecast Says Clouds,” Citrix Systems CEO Mark Templeton said, “The Holy Grail is to deliver IT services on-demand.” In her keynote, Marie Hattar, VP for network systems and security solutions at Cisco Systems, said, “It’s all leading to a world where business is conducted through networks that are virtually borderless.”

Notable exhibitors at Dreamforce included:

• Pervasive Software: Integration platform that quickly connects Salesforce.com with enterprise applications, databases, file formats, other SaaS applications, and legacy data.
• Sesame Software: Relational Junction product suite provides a SQL interface to Salesforce.com for integration and bi-directional data warehousing of all Salesforce data with any database platform.
• Birst: On-demand business intelligence providing analysis and reporting solutions that are quick to deploy, easy to use, and affordable, so that many users can benefit from greater insight into their business.
• BranchIt, an enterprise relationship management solution that helps your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.

Other great SaaS products that integrate with Salesforce.com include:

• eiVia, a SaaS business intelligence (BI) application that provides predictive analytics for decision-making.
• mashmatrix Dashboard, an enterprise mashup dashboard that provides rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• Mimiran, a price-optimization application that helps you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• TrackVia, an enterprise cloud database that enables you to quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• TriCipher, a cloud-based single sign-on system that provides a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications. It improves administration by making it easy to grant and revoke access to enterprise cloud-based and on-premises applications.

With 19,000 attendees at Dreamforce, Colin Powell now a VC in the cloud-computing industry, and pro-cloud keynotes from Cisco Systems and Citrix Systems at Interop, it’s clear we’re on to something.

How do you plan to join great companies and leaders moving to cloud computing?