Dreamforce 2011: Marc Benioff keynote launches social enterprise as a true paradigm shift

Marc Benioff announced today a fundamental shift for Salesforce as its Autumn Release (probably in October) will put the company in the way it operates as fully immersive into Social Enterprise. Today's announcements are designed to engage the corporate leadership in a way that will fundamentally change their strategies and it is already happening!

The list of corporate leaders that have adopted this approach already is truly impressive.

Lord Rothermere, DMGT stated that since adopting social enterprise he has seen more innovation in the past few months compared to the previous 12 years.

Another corporate leader for the UK was Angela Ahrendts, the CEO of Burberry. She met Marc in May of this year and was so inspired about the social enterprise that she has already launched Burberry World.

Other impressive stories came from Toyota that has branded the term Toyota Friend which is a new concept Marc calls Product Social Networks. Coco Cola has also adopted this approach by using their vending machines to become smart by interacting with the customer and using gamification as a rewards system.

My passion is artificial agents and using them to advance Product Social Networks is a pure natural fit. Any product could then have a dialogue with customers.

It was amazing to listening to Groupon, who integrated social enterprise into their offering from the outset leading to their spectacular growth.

Dreamforce is about business and the vast majority of people are from the business side.

Microsoft, Oracle and SAP now feel like dinosaurs in comparison as their community are the tech heads. I do wish Steve Ballmer reads this as I did try and get him to focus on business people and not technology some years ago!!

Today, there were so many new product announcements that it is the equivalent of a 10 year cycle for traditional software products. It has only taken Salesforce 10 months to deliver thus cycle compared to 10 years!!

Well done to Marc Benioff and his team as they are truly going to lead the transformation of the enterprise, which is happening faster than most people realise.

Social Enterprise is agnostic in terms of age, gender, race, status etc. This is really about transparency (knowledge economy) versus non transparency (industrial economy). The outcome is inevitable!