The focus of the Day 1 keynote was the announcement of Salesforce "Sites", which is the ability to allow anonymous, public access to VisualForce pages.

Evangelizing the need for tighter integration between websites and CRM has, at times, seemed like an uphill battle for us the past 3 years. This announcement brought Customer Experience Management to the forefront and shifted the conversation from "build or buy" to "which cloud platform" to use for web development almost over night.

The timing of our ".NET As A Service" announcement was extremely relevant and we had many interesting conversations with visitors to our booth in the expo hall.

The keynote then shifted to a discussion with Neil Young and his LincVolt project. With the pending bailout of Detroit auto manufacturers looming, it was inspiring to see this "Single Man with a Vision" story as Neil revealed a multi-fueled (primarily battery powered) converted 1959 Lincoln.

Foo Fighters played the Monday night Gala (the temporary loss of hearing was well worth it).

"No servers" and "No software" continued to be the mantra through the Day 2 keynote as Salesforce demonstrated a real-world use case of how Dell is using Salesforce for channel management and using customer Ideas. In typical contrarian style, Michael Dell came out on stage and proceeded to promote notebooks, servers, and SCSI array configuration software (gotta love this guy).

Suppressed from this years Dreamforce event was any mention of Venture Capital or the $400+ Million invested in Salesforce partner solutions to date. The partner summit on Wednesday had a much more pragmatic tone that revealed the true lower cost to entry made available by Platform-As-A-Service and the ability to get going without equity investment.

Another contrast from last years message was Salesforce's emphasis to "double down" on horizontal CRM platform services and empower partners to build native vertical applications.

In conclusion, my general sense is that the current economy is forcing a process of retrenchment around the world. Cloud computing is benefiting from this paradigm shift because of its demonstrable cost reductions and efficiencies of scale. One of my favorite quotes from a CIO at the event said "By this time next year, the leader in your market will be leveraging cloud computing. I hope that company is yours."