September 03, 2015 | Andrew Lawlor

In a very short time, San Francisco will once again be the host city for the largest software conference in the world, Dreamforce. Last year Salesforce counted more than 130,000 registered attendees from over 90 countries at the big event.

Hopefully, you and your teams already have booked hotel rooms for what promises to be another packed — and action-packed — convention this year. Salesforce is offering 1,500 sessions over four days and featuring keynotes from tech industry leaders Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, and of course its own Marc Benioff. Also in the lineup are celebrities like Jessica Alba speaking on the topic of women’s leadership — plus the Foo Fighters and Gary Clark Jr. performing at the Dreamfest and UCSF Benefit on Sept 17.

I know the entertainment and parties will be great, but I’m really looking forward to the conference for two main reasons. One of them is to get more insight into the direction Salesforce has in mind for platforms it’s made a big splash about in recent years. These platforms matter a lot to the work we can do for our customers here at Aptaria.

That includes the Salesforce1 enterprise cloud platform for building custom mobile apps, connecting data and managing all those components, and I’ll be particularly interested to learn more about the company’s expanding mobility strategy. I’ll also be paying attention to what’s up for its Marketing Cloud product, which just added another social media integration. Now, marketers can buy Instagram advertising and synch CRM data to optimize that advertising right from the Salesforce platform.

As much as I’m hoping to get a good education about Salesforce’s next steps, I’m equally looking forward to the opportunity to help conference-goers learn how Aptaria can help them fulfill their CRM and App development services needs. We’re excited this year to be a Dreamforce sponsor and to have a chance to talk to attendees — from those in the C-suite to architects, developers, product managers, and marketers — about our work as a Product Development Partner building solutions that our clients can put up on the Salesforce AppExchange. We’ll be discussing and demonstrating our capacity both in our booth in the Partner Zone in the Park Central San Francisco Hotel Just a block from Moscone Center and at the theatre there during a presentation we’re giving with the help of some of our customers.

We expect the presentation to feature an executive from CQ Roll Call, the leading provider of Congressional news, legislative tracking and advocacy services, who will show the audience the work we performed to help it grow its potential customer base for its Engage for Salesforce AppExchange app. (You can read some more about that here.) Also expected to join us on stage is a leader from software vendor eformix, for whom we built an App with mobile capabilities that helps its healthcare organization customers comply with regulatory requirements, including updating data while in offline mode. Then, when they are back online, they can sync the updates to their Salesforce data in the cloud for further processing and analytics. (Find out more about that solution here.)

In addition to seeing demonstrations of these apps, the audience at our presentation will get a chance to hear about these clients’ experiences in outsourcing development to a Salesforce Development Partner, or PDO. With only 16 certified PDOs in the United States, and just 31 globally, there are many veteran Salesforce users who don’t yet know much about PDOs, but I suspect that will change in coming months, starting at Dreamforce.

Attendees will get a good perspective on the benefits of hiring a PDO to handle the technical challenges of building AppExchange applications that integrate with their solutions, seamlessly getting data into and out of Salesforce as needed.

One prime benefit of using a PDO is that it saves their companies the trouble of building up a staff that knows how to develop applications on the Salesforce platform, especially mobile applications. It’s no small thing to acquire in-house talent that understands how to build an application that will make it onto the Salesforce AppExchange on the first submission, given the rigorous security review and other processes required by Salesforce to protect its brand and the community.

We hope you’ll come to our booth and our presentation at Dreamforce 2015. Reach out to set up a specific time to talk, or just stop by the Partner Zone with any questions you may have about working with a PDO on your AppExchange efforts, and we’ll be happy to take them up with you.

See you there next week!