Last week, the Dreamforce 2015 conference in San Francisco swelled the city’s population by almost 20%, with 160,000 attendees wandering the streets of the city looking for the next session. The “City ” (think: rock band Journey’s famous chorus, “when the lights go out in the Cit-ay! “) was so packed with people that Salesforce rented a cruise ship for extra hotel rooms, and many still had to find a room in Oakland across the Bay.

In other words, Dreamforce is big. How big? So big that city leaders were concerned that people wouldn’t be able to find a place to eat lunch. To help with that, the daily San Francisco Chronicle made this entreaty to conference goers: “To help readers who work and eat downtown manage the melee, we’ll be covering the lunchtime scene at restaurants on Twitter all week using the hashtag #Lunchforce. And we need your help. If your go-to restaurant is jam-packed, use the hashtag to spread the word on Twitter using #Lunchforce. If you find a spot that’s free from the crowds, get your food first — then Tweet the location. ” The conference attendees were easy to spot because each one had a stylish backpack so cool that local style gurus cooed, “Gone are the large blue panels with garish orange accents that made the last two backpacks plainly visible to the naked eye from a block away. This year’s model is covered in a durable flannel-like fabric that looks like it came off a light-gray business suit. “

You get the picture: Dreamforce was an Event with a capital-E. It was a celebration of California-style entrepreneurial tech on a grand scale. And center stage was Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff. Benioff is a big guy with a big heart, and the philanthropic thread that runs through the company he co-founded was everywhere to be seen. For example, after introducing his mother to the audience as a breast cancer survivor, he interviewed Dr. Laura Esserman of Athena, a collaboration with the University of California that focuses on breast cancer prevention, screening, and treatment. Athena is using the Salesforce data platform in an innovative way to assist doctors and their patients during the screening and treatment process, by tailoring treatments to biology, patient preference, and performance.

In his keynote, Benioff underlined his belief that Salesforce represents “a new technology model, new business model, and a new philanthropy model. ” He highlighted that the Salesforce platform is a network-native multi-tenancy model with pay-as-you-go pricing, and philanthropy built-in (for example, Dreamforce itself is a non-profit event). And, it seems to be working: the CEO proclaimed that next year, Salesforce will be fourth largest software company (behind Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP).

But beyond being a new business model, Salesforce also enables new business models. For example, in the run-up to Benioff’s keynote, George Zimmer (of “I guarantee it ” fame), talked about his new company, Generation Tux. The company is an online tuxedo rental service, but with a twist. According to CTO Matt Howland, you can rent a tux without ever leaving your home, and every piece of the “solution ” (the tux, the cummerbund, the tie, etc.) is RFID tagged and associated with the order via the Salesforce platform. During the selection process, customers and sales associates “co-browse ” the online site to ensure a high quality service and a perfect fit. Said Zimmer, “there are no backorders in weddings “- you have to get it right.

The Retail Story

In his keynote, CEO Benioff said that Salesforce is a “customer success platform ” that enables “1-to-1 relationships, write once, great everywhere “, and is “the world’s largest enterprise ecosystem ” that enables “mass customization and a hi-fidelity relationship. ” The linkages to the Retail industry seem pretty clear.

And so, at a retailer reception at San Francisco’s Bloomingdales, I had a chance to see all of that in action. On the way there, I stopped at TOMS, the shoe company famous for its philanthropic one-for-one pledge (for every pair of shoes that TOMS sells, it donates a pair of shoes to a child in need on behalf of the customer). TOMS is using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to design and execute customer “journeys ” (marketing campaigns). The interface is easy and intuitive, emphasizing the creative process and de-emphasizing the technology that supports it.

At the Bloomingdales reception, Salesforce Senior VP of Retail & Consumer Products Industry Solutions Shelley Bransten kicked things off by saying that, “Retail is going to change in the next 3 years more than it has in the last 50 years… Mobile is about being where your customer is, social is about participating in the conversation, and Cloud is about the flexibility and the speed to do it at the new pace of the industry. “

Bransten highlighted three drivers that are fueling “the retail revolution “: Me2Be (Salesforce’s way of saying customer-to-business), the store strikes back (the reinvigoration of the store), and shopping deconstructed (what I’ve called the “harmonized digital-physical shopping experience “). The executive said that these drivers are enabling “personalization everywhere “, “super-charged employees “, and “agile innovation ” within the enterprise. All of this is made possible by “systems of engagement ” powered by the Cloud, mobile, social media, and a lot of data science.

Salesforce’s enabling technology is available via what it calls its “six clouds “: the Sales Cloud (the CRM heart of Salesforce), the Marketing Cloud (as mentioned in the TOMS example), the Service Cloud (a customer service module that provides tools to manage the customer experience), the Community Cloud (a collaboration platform for customers, partners and employees), and – interesting to a data geek like me – anAnalytics Cloud (visual data analytics).

In her remarks, SVP Bransten said, “we take that old idea of ‘the little black book’ concept, enabling the sales associate to take that little black book, make it digital, know everything about a customer that’s relevant to make the transaction “. Because the heart of the Salesforce platform is its CRM capability, that “little black book ” idea makes perfect sense especially for department stores and specialty & fashion retailers (in addition to Bloomingdale’s, the company boasts customers such as Coach, Burburry, Victoria’s Secret, John Lewis, Kohl’s, and others). But mass merchants such as Walmart, Target, and Home Depot, and food & drug retailers like Whole Foods and Walgreens have found utility in the Community Cloud for employee enablement as well.

Just a Little Peek At the Tech

Salesforce is definitely making a Retail industry play, and the company has already won a lot of marquee customers. A huge part of that is the result of the apparent ease with which the solutions’ capabilities can be layered on top of legacy portfolios. As one Salesforce sales associate told me, “we’re very friendly with legacy ERP, best-of-breed, and even proprietary systems. “

So, how does Salesforce do it? Essentially, the platform offers a set of standards based application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable four levels of integration between Salesforce and other applications: data integration, business logic integration, user interface integration, and security integration.

‘No Software’, Or ‘No Old Software’?

A lot of solution providers are offering Cloud-based capabilities nowadays, and many of those offerings are the outgrowth of legacy systems that have been re-engineered to some extent so that they can be offered as a set of services. Retailers have been wary of commercial clouds for their core business processes for a bunch of reasons, but they all boil down to a hard-won belief that “if it’s critical to the business, we have to own it. ” The problem now is that so much of retailers’ core technology portfolios need to change to meet the needs of todays’ consumers that they can’t possibly more fast enough or spend enough to modernize their internal systems. So “Cloud ” offers an alternative way to deliver technology value, quickly and without massive capital outlays.

What makes Salesforce interesting (aside from the fact that so many credible retailers have already jumped on the bandwagon) is that it’s a network-native company whose solutions were built from the start to be a multi-tenant, pay-as-you-go, implement-once/use-everywhere solution set. There was no re-engineering necessary. While the company’s motto is “no software “, what it really means is “no outdated software “.

But in the end, these things should be decided based on business need and not technology. So a retailer might look at Salesforce for the same reason that SuitSupply, a Dutch men’s clothier that now has 60 stores in 20 countries, did. The company’s Marketing Technology Manager Nick Botter simply explained that the company’s systems were too transactional, and did not support customer interaction. So they implemented email marketing using the Saleforce Marketing Cloud, created social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and integrated those via the Salesforce Sales Cloud, and implemented the Salesforce Service Cloud to enable 80 stylists to help customers get the right style and fit. The company reportedly implemented these capabilities “in months, not years. “

Whether or not a retailer chooses Salesforce solutions, two things should be clear: the customer must be at the center of everything a retailer does, and retailers have to move faster than ever before to keep up. Network-native solutions offer a revolutionary way to attack those challenges.

Dreamforce 2015 was, more than anything, a celebration of the successes that companies have had by taking that approach.