Distilling the important information out of the bulk of announcements made at Dreamforce is tough. Don't worry-- Holger Mueller, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff and Alan Lepofsky have absorbed, analyzed, and laid out everything you need to know about the Customer Success Platform, Analytics Cloud, and Lightning. If you're a CIO, CMO, HR technology buyer, or customer officer you can't afford to miss this Dreamforce rundown. 
 
Here is what we talk about:
  • Salesforce positions as the Customer Success Platform
  • Salesforce launches its 6th cloud (after Sales, Marketing, Service, Communities and Apps) - it is the Analytics Cloud
  • Salesforce announces the Lightning framework to build applications faster. 
 
Takeaways for technology buyers:
  • Look at Analytics Cloud value proposition - The Analytics cloud with $125 for a regular user and $250 for a professional user comes with a steep (list) price. What is the value / cost relationship for your enterprise, start from here.
  • Consider (existing) alternatives - It is very likely your enterprise has already a place where 3rd party information is brought together for insights, so have a look at that and compare it with Salesforce's Analytics Cloud. 
  • Take stock and plan for 2015 - Look at what systems you have, but also look larger and include people and training and then start planning for 2015.
  • Revisit Collaboration - Don't look at Chatter and Collaboration as stand alone, but bring them into business processes across sales, marketing and engineering (and more) to make them more efficient. 
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