I did consider the possibility that Dreamforce would turn out to be underwhelming – but this apprehension was quickly erased before I even walked in the doors by a casual passing of Marc Benioff. After watching his Keynote live and hearing about him from my team, I expected him to be larger than life, and he was. Seems Dreamforce would be exactly what I was hoping for.
After fulfilling my celebrity sighting for the day, I was ready to start the event. We began our hike in the training area where Salesforce products were explained and showcased for available learning.
If you have done much California hiking, you would feel right at home on the redwood-decorated “trail.” After completing our first walk-through and hearing product lessons, we just couldn’t resist revisiting the “campground” to collect pins and badges. The marketing team here sure knows their audience.
After the Trailhead, we entered the Cloud Expo to interact among my peers. From Silicon Valley neighbors to European visitors, I met many of the corporations helping to shape the cloud industry of today.
But the thing that impressed me the most? The sheer size of the event. What an incredible and diverse gathering of individuals interested in a better tomorrow.
Wish you were there too? Watch Dreamforce on Salesforce Live this year. But next year, be sure to hit the trail and I already found the dates.
For decades, IT has been dominated by males, with women technocrats having limited access to boardrooms. However, this trend is changing drastically as women enter strategic positions across the industry. The increasing participation of women in the tech industry and their growing influence is commendable. Still, there is a lot work to do before we see ‘real’ gender equality in the technology sector.
ABI is doing the work! They are empowering women on technology, entrepreneurship, career development, leadership, and advancing gender diversity in the workforce.
GHC/1 was recently held in Delhi and the experience was quite motivating. The conference had approximately 485 women in attendance, crossing technological roles to non-technological roles and ranging from professionals to students to aspiring entrepreneurs. The center of discussions was technology, entrepreneurship, and achieving a gender-diverse technology workforce.
One of the most intriguing discussions was “Digital Revolution – How the customer is embracing the technology.” The panelists were Deep Kalra (Chairman, Makemytrip), Harmeen Mehta (Global CIO, Bharti Airtel), Sanjay Rishi (President, American Express S.Asia) and Shikha Rai (VP, Canon India), all experts in their domain. Discussion included how panelists are transforming themselves alongside the revolution in technology.
The discussion revealed how customers are the primary force behind the shift to digital transformation. In light of the fact that most people use social networks and digital interactive tools in their daily life, it’s reasonable for businesses to undertake digital transformation. Every business now runs on our smartphones. Companies are becoming more and more user and app-friendly to capture customers’ attentions. The role of social media also cannot be ignored. Tweets go viral in no time so target companies must acknowledge and, sometimes, take corrective measures for their reputation.
The session gave way to a Fireside Chat with Rentala Shekhar, Chairman of NASSCOM, who emphasized supporting a flexible culture for women starting families.
There was also a discussion by Bharathram Thothadri (Chief Credit Officer, American Express and Managing Director, RIM India) on “Big Data and the rise of Fintech.” Fintech, or Financial Technology, encompasses a wide of companies using software to provide financial services. The major examples in this field are companies like Paytm and PolicyBazar.com. It’s interesting to see how such complex things as deciding on fund investment or taking a policy have become user friendly with big data and technology.
On the innovation side, we had Meetul Patel (General Manager of Marketing and Operations, Microsoft, India). He made us realize how unaware we are of women inventors. Watch the discussion’s video here. The names that first come to our minds are mostly male. We hardly know of any female inventions. Does that mean women have not invented yet? No! You will be surprised when you Google to see the list of incredible inventions we (women) have done.
Another session of interest was “Role of Innovation in Entrepreneurship.” Aparna Gupta (Managing Director, FirstRain India) was the discussion moderator. To hear more of her thoughts, read her recent interview on business intelligence in a world of mergers and acquisitions, posted on CIO. On the panel were four women, all innovators, who spoke about how an innovation can change one’s life and the live
s of those around them. One such innovation, and a crowd favorite, was from Anusheela Saha. Saha designed solar powered school bags for children in poverty, so they can study at night. The bag has solar panels attached to the front flap and LED lights on the reverse. The bags are charged as children walk to school and throughout the school day.
My take away from this experience is that women should go for it with their business ideas. It’s ok to fail at first. But if you do not try, you will never learn!
The event was concluded by a workshop by the founder of Storywallahs.com, Mr. Ameen Haque. The “Art of corporate story telling” session explained that one should weave an honest story about yourself and your work if you want to be remembered for long. What do you remember most –math classes or stories from your grandparents?
Overall it was a splendid networking event where women got to meet and be motivated by the life stories of domain experts. I met with Dr. Vibha Tripathi (Founder of Swajal) and Mr. Ameen Haque in between the tea breaks and was fascinated by how modest, yet intelligent, they were in their respective domains. Looking forward to next year’s session!
Mehgna Puri, Senior Analyst, Customer Success
Chitra Singh, HR Manager
There are only 25 days until Dreamforce 2016! Recently on their blog, Salesforce pointed out how to make the most of your airplane hours on the way to Dreamforce. This inspired the FirstRain team to optimize other often-wasted moments of time that are part of the full Dreamforce experience – time spent digging for information and time spent commuting from hotel to event, event to hotel. Luckily, we found a optimization with hotel service, Perch.
We were first introduced to Perch through the Women in Tech Salesforce User Group as FirstRain has been participating in “Girly Geeks” events for over the past four years. Later, FirstRain and Perch realized that, when united, they could help you get the most out of your Dreamforce experience. The shared advantages of using FirstRain and Perch can easily been visualized in this infographic.
Networking is, at its core, socializing (perhaps with a drink in hand or via escalator rides up and down Moscone). There is no doubt, that at Dreamforce, you will have the opportunity to meet inspiring and knowledgeable individuals. Rather than waste time desperately researching to keep up, FirstRain can give you instant updates on market and industry topics around the world. Impress your peers with smart insights around the companies and industries they work in so you can spend more time connecting and less time looking down at pages of irrelevant search results.
Since we are both committed to your success at Dreamforce, every Dreamforce attendee booking their stay through Perch will receive complementary access to FirstRain through October.
Don’t forget to set up FirstRain on your mobile phone for on-the-go access throughout the conference.
Enjoy!
You saw Lightning. You heard Thunder. Did you discover FirstRain?
For our fifth year running, the FirstRain team was a force to be reckoned with at Dreamforce, with the mission of sharing FirstRain’s brand new product release, a powerful analytics platform called Orion.
Marching through the crowd, our astronaut met and took pictures with many conference attendees and was even featured on KPIX Channel 5 news.
As a part of our Discover FirstRain initiatives, we held Exploration Sessions where executives toured our platform and learned how to use FirstRain to tap into their customer’s world through real-time analytics of their markets, competitors, critical events and developments in key sectors and product lines.
The attendees had a chance to preview our newest families of analytics that create even richer business insights, a newly designed user interface that allows to both get a bird-eye view of the industries and markets that the sales rep sells into, and do a deep-dives into topics and markets that help them make smarter decisions.
In good Dreamforce spirit, of course we had to raffle off something. Sorry, it wasn’t a Tesla Model X—maybe next year. But Jessie, who attended one of our Exploration Sessions, won a GoPro, courtesy of the FirstRain marketing team. Congratulations Jessie! We are looking forward to collaborating with you in the future. Send us some videos of your adventures with it!
FirstRain is proud to be on the forefront of today’s business analytics technology platform and enrich the Salesforce experience right inside CRM workflows. While Salesforce helps you manage leads, pipeline and forecasts, FirstRain provides personalized high precision insights on your accounts, end markets and competitors. The custom analytics are flexible, manageable, extensible and easy to understand and act upon. Our technology brings together dynamic categorization of the global enterprise data sources including web and social that are highly relevant to each user and augmented with real-time scoring and ranking across all sales rep’s accounts.
Interested?
Visit us on the Salesforce AppExchange or Contact Us for a demo.
FirstRain’s case submitted on ‘Personal business analytics platform for reasons to call’ was selected for NASSCOM Top 50 ‘Excellence in Analytics’ 2015. The case study was selected from over 200 submissions received. As a result, NASSCOM has released a report reflecting the application, innovation, and maturity of analytics. The evolution of new technology that drives analytics adoption is trademarking globally. Shifting to a analytics centered culture is an exponential, high-powered change.
Read the report here.
FirstRain is proud to be named a finalist for “New Product of the Year – Business Intelligence Solution” as part of the Annual American Business Awards for our recently released Personal Business Analytics for CRM solution!
Our submission highlighted the “unique way that FirstRain ranks top accounts by the quality of triggers that are dynamically discovered based on a user’s role, and the products and services they sell. And how using an adaptive business graph that delivers unmatched categorization and precision, and in-the-moment, context-aware personalization, FirstRain can coach sales teams by alerting them of “Deal Breakers” and ”Accelerators” – which include real-time triggered events on potential risks in active Salesforce.com sales opportunities, or real-world events that will help accelerate sales discussions.”
As a result of our nomination, we are included in voting for the People’s Choice Stevie Awards for Favorite New Products.
Voting is open, and the winners will be honored at The American Business Awards’ new product & tech awards banquet in San Francisco in September 2015.
TO VOTE, PLEASE GO TO:
Short Code: W496Y
FirstRain’s case study on Personal business analytics platform for reasons to call has been chosen for NASSCOM’s Top 50 Excellence in Analytics 2015. The award was presented at the NASSCOM Big Data & Analytics Summit in Hyderabad, India on June 25, 2015 with the theme of “Data-Driven Disruption – The Next Frontier”. The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) is a trade association of Indian Information Technology (IT) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. This summit brings together industry professionals, companies and individuals from the field of Big Data and Analytics.
MohanaKrishnan, Director, NASSCOM, said “Disruptive technologies, informed customers, rapidly changing business models are presenting challenges as well as opportunities for enterprises to explore innovative solutions available in the ecosystem. The need for drawing better insights from huge volumes of data has fueled the need for innovative analytic solutions”.
FirstRain analyzes external and internal unstructured data to coach teams and professionals on key business developments that affect their go-to-market strategy, business relationships, and investments.
The dawn of data-driven is here. Gone are the days of getting excited about backwards-looking analytics and reporting. Join us at INmarket on July 8th, in San Francisco to explore how data and AI are driving billions of dollars of revenue for B2B marketing and sales. Predictive intelligence will impact all industries, businesses, and our daily lives in ways we can only begin to imagine.
Speakers include senior executives from Cisco, Forrester, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, MongoDB, CSC, NetSuite, Lenovo and many more. The agenda will include topics such as:
As a partner of 6sense, we’re happy to share a 25% off discount code with you (plus all registrations go to . Use code FIRSTRAIN when you register and we will see you there!
The 2015 SAVO Sales Enablement Summit theme – Spotlight on Growth – brings together an elite community of sales, sales enablement, sales operations and marketing professionals united with a common objective – driving growth through a highly effective, productive and tightly integrated sales ecosystem.
FirstRain is proud to be a sponsor at this year’s summit and to show our support we will be exhibiting and demonstrating how our mutual customers can use SAVO and FirstRain together to drive growth.
The SAVO team has done a great job leading up to the Summit sharing with attendees the best way to take full advantage of the Summit. Here are a few blog posts that highlight what we all have in store for us this week:
There are also some great customer testimonials written from by Michelle Genser that are must reads if you are attending:
We look forward to meeting all the SAVO teams as well as customers at this year’s summit, and will be at the SAVO Smarter Selling Lounge from Tuesday evening June 2nd through Thursday June 4th.
FirstRain COO, YY Lee, is giving a speech at Thomson Reuter’s Data Science Meetup “Rubber Meets the Road: What’s hard about deriving real meaning from data” tonight in San Francisco.
In her presentation, YY will share her expertise on deriving business developments, implicit relationships, and “meaningful insight” from vast swaths of online and social content across the global web. She will share FirstRain’s experience in addressing the following data science problems to deliver deeply personalized information experience to business professionals:
The event is being held at Galvanize in San Francisco tonight from 6:00 – 9:00pm. We are looking forward to meeting you!
