Key takeaways from Dreamforce 2022
The Dreamforce is back — 40,000 attendees, three days — this is the size of the industry’s most important Salesforce conference. It was the first big get-together since 2019 and the break caused by the pandemic, and it was jam-packed with new product announcements. But what were the highlights of the 20th Dreamforce from an architect’s perspective?
Genie — Magic or rebranding?
The biggest buzz Salesforce tried to create was around ‘Genie’. Salesforce Genie was everywhere at Dreamforce ’22. The promise sounds bold: “Genie powers the first-ever real-time CRM”. The announcement of Genie in the main keynote raised a few eyebrows in the audience, as many of the viewers, including me, at the look and feel of the demo got the impression: “ah — it’s the Salesforce CDP”. This impression was intensified by the first screens still showing the label “CDP” in the header. So is it just a rebranding (again)?
The answer to that is yes — and no. If you dive a bit deeper into the documentation that’s already available, Genie draws on some capabilities of the Salesforce CDP and the Salesforce Interaction Studio (now called Personalization). Genie tries to bring transactional and engagement data together and fuse into a known format: Salesforce Metadata (object model). With this — and that’s at least Salesforce’s promise — more use-cases are possible, and not just pure marketing use-cases a ‘classic’ CDP focuses on. With this, Salesforce is looking into the direction of Sales and Service.
To achieve this, Genie relies on a Salesforce Hyperforce setup. To put it into simple terms: Hyperforce allows a user to operate Salesforce in an own, dedicated environment. All data is stored in the same platform. Genie now operates within and with this data sitting in the same platform to provide all the promised services. As Hyperforce is mandatory, it will be exciting to see how the Salesforce solutions evolve at different speeds — those on Hyperforce and those in the standard Salesforce multi-tenant.
Scratching the Surface
What all keynotes had in common was that they mostly only scratched the surface. I hope Salesforce finds a way to improve their storytelling. Apple, as one role model, presents its new products in its keynotes at a very sophisticated level of technical explanation. Especially with respect to its audience, the end customer. I would like to encourage Salesforce to go in the same direction. Yes, on the one hand it’s cool if you can present your products as simple and easy as possible, but it would be cool as well if they went a little deeper. Take the Genie presentation as an example, or the Mulesoft RPI presentation in the Architect Keynote. Why not show the result of the generated API and how to work/adjust it? Whenever things got interesting, Salesforce faded out.
Well-Architected — amazing content
At the last Dreamforce Salesforce announced in their first Architect Keynote the introduction of the ‘Well-Architected’ framework. Over the last few months, Salesforce released content related to the framework and used the opportunity of Dreamforce ’22 to celebrate the launch of ‘Well-Architected’. It provides guardrails to deliver a trusted, easy and adaptable Salesforce solution. The withepapers as part of the framework provide a great level of detail and share some great best practices to build robust solutions. To give an example: Use SOSL for reads and SOQL for writes. This approach as part of the ‘trusted’-pillar is rarely seen in the real world, but could have a huge impact in terms of scalability. I appreciate the approach to put most of the content into simple decision-matrices, too.
The ‘Well-Architected’ framework was launched at the Dreamforce ’22 with ongoing hands-on workshops around building a secure, compliant, reliable, simple, automated, engaging, resilient and composable Salesforce solution. Mostly, Salesforce CTAs worked together with interested attendees in groups of 30 on those particular use-cases. These workshops were the hidden-gems this year and provided a great learning experience — exactly what you expect from a Dreamforce. Sometimes it doesn’t need a new product. It just requires a better explanation of how to use it.
Product Evolutions everywhere
In many other areas, Salesforce architects were presented with interesting product enhancements. Yes, for smaller (and maybe bigger?) customers, the DevOps Center could be one of them. It introduces a more native way to deploy metadata along the development lifecycle and comes with the support of version control — obviously with all the known Salesforce platform limitations (looking at you missing easy-roll-back function).
Another promising add-on could be the Scale Center. A tool providing real-time observability and insights. Finally, it’s much easier to identify the root-cause for bottlenecks and performance issues like lock-rows. Graphical visualization could help to track the performance of running automations after bigger deployments: Is everything still running smoothly after the change? They could also help observe the platform on business critical days like Black Fridays closer and near real-time.
In the Q&A session “True of the Core”, Bret Taylor promised to simplify the license model for feature licenses. For architects, even more interesting was the promise to introduce a solution for integration users. Sticking to best practice of having a per user integration could sometimes result in the need of 20+ full user licenses. Bret assured to find a better (and cheaper) solution.
Get together again
Besides all the products and announcements, much more important was the big get-together of the whole Salesforce community. Having a dedicated space to share and discuss insights around the ecosystem is essential, and the effort Salesforce put into this year’s Dreamforce paid off big time. Salesforce lives on in its enthusiastic community, and this year’s Dreamforce proved it again.
