Making waves at Dreamforce 2014

Love him or hate him, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff draws a crowd. The Dreamforce conference and exhibition keynotes feature lasers, surprise guest pop stars, politicians and, this year, former world statesmen and stateswomen. This is a cloud software company with an increasing focus on software application developers and a widening stack to extend what was its initial sole focus on customer relationship management.

The company’s key product launch this year was its Wave data analytics technology, which it hopes will allow users to put marketing analytics software on any device using any data source. Suitable for non-technical users, but also with appeal for programmers, the Wave mobile app will be initially available on Apple iOS for iPhone and iPad from late October 2014.

Salesforce.com also used the show to release its Salesforce1 Lightning product for building mobile applications. The Lightning App Builder is aligned for technical and non-technical users to build software applications via point-and-click controls that do not require a granular level understanding of software engineering.