Event Scorecard - Salesforce Dreamforce 2015 - App, Analytics, IoT

So how did Salesforce do? 

• The messaging stayed around 'Customer Success Platform' - a good move. I have been critical of Salesforce changing / pivoting the messaging too fast - yearly - so it's good to see it remained the same. Software needs time to catch up - so glad to see the same uber messages. 
• The Salesforce App Cloud turned out to be the major announcement of the conference. Customers and partners are excited about the new capabilities. Developers cheered when they saw the drop down deploy capabilties across AWS locations for their Heroku apps. And Trailhead is a well received, massive developer know how effort. Effectively App Cloud is the first cross cloud PaaS platform. 
• Lightning is becoming a confusing branding name for all kind of products - but they key is the new Lightning experience - finally a new UI for Salesforce. Starting mostly with Sales Cloud in the Winter release. The question is of course - why peacemeal this in a declarative UI architecture? Why not turn it all on? Kudos for the option of customers to operate both old and new UI at the same time. 
• Analytics Cloud has made good progress, mostly has become material beyond the announcement stage from last year. Salesforce is upgrading its reporting with better visualization, and with a price tag. But vendors should be allowed to charge for innovation. Concerns remain on the default daily update, which is a good starting point but cannot be the end state for enterprises in the faster and faster moving speed of business in the 21st century.
• The ecosystem is alive and well. We spike with a number of ISVs and they are both successful building on the Salesforce platforms their apps from scratch, as well as uptaking Salesforce innovations like Analytics Cloud and IoT Cloud.
• Aging Architecture - Salesforce has componentized (part of last year Salesforce1 efforts) and now a new UI with Lightning Experience. In a Q&A Salesforce founder Harris stressed that Salesforce is re-factoring all the time, but that cannot mislead that the core of the automation runs on a now 16+ year old conceptual architecture sitting on top of the Oracle database. Hardly where you want to be today, hardly 'cloud native'. And let's keep in mind, by now this architecture is older than the ERP architectures at the time Salesforce positioned those as obsolete 15 years back (e.g. R/3 was 10 years old in 2001, e-Business Suite 4 years old). On the flipside it is a very, very successful architecture that has powered Salesforce to become the #1 SaaS vendor. But age creeps up on humans and software...  an area customers need to pay attention to and from our conversations are increasingly.