The carnival that eats San Francisco for a week, produced yet another impressive set of numbers:

• 170,000 registered delegates (one fifth of the host city’s population)
• 2600 speakers
• 1600 sessions
• 400 exhibitors
• 10 million online viewers

With program sessions devoted to “wellness” and “inspirational leadership”, Dreamforce can be described as “the Burning Man festival but with everyone wearing clothes and talking all day about cloud computing”.

The core message was that companies must be committed to capturing, connecting and acting on customer data across the engagement spectrum with a dynamic, agile customer management platform.

SFDC is now the fourth largest software company in the world, after Microsoft, Oracle and SAP and is on track to become the first Software-as-a-Service subscription company to hit $US 10b in revenue.

None of the annual customer conferences organised by SFDC’s currently larger rivals _ Oracle’s OpenWorld, SAP’s SAPPHIRE Now, or Microsoft’s Convergence events _  go close to matching Dreamforce’s numbers. Customer management or what founder Mark Benioff describes as “customer success” is generating all the momentum and energy:

If your CRM _ meaning analytics, sales automation, marketing,  service, collaboration and mobility _ is not pivotal to your company, then you have a major structural deficiency.

This old-school configuration, with CRM disconnected, does not work:

Exuberant SFDC founder Mark Benioff asserted that the event is now the world’s biggest business conference.

Heavy hitters, such as GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt and Burberry’s Angela Ahrendts, were on the program.

Virgin supremo Richard Branson was also on stage to add his brand to the list of big names (IBM, HP, Kimberley Clark and Microsoft) that have abandoned Siebel in recent times.

The hour long “fireside chat” between Branson and Benioff was genuinely engaging. They traversed across a diverse range of topics, from management styles, to Branson’s early days, space travel and Keith Richards anecdotes.

Check it out here:

Benioff restated his view that the conventional, mega vendors, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, are moving far too slowly away from their on-premise business models.

“You can see how they continue to resist multi-tenancy and shared systems and then they’re kind of moving to there, but they’re kind of not,” Beneioff said. “I think it’s really been a disservice to themselves what they’ve done, and to the whole industry.”

Indeed, Oracle was miffed that four streets around the Moscone convention centre were blocked off for the duration of the event versus three for Oracle’s Open World which will be held next month at the same venue.

Financial analysts may query SFDC’s sky high earnings-per-share ratio and their promotion of so-called non-GAAP earnings, but there is no doubt the company is moving forward at a rapid rate.

Forbes magazine recently rated SFDC as the world’s most innovative company for the 2nd year in the row and for the third year in succession CRM magazine ranked the platform as the CRM market’s leader.

In the meantime, back in Australia, business technology research firm, Ovum, has issued a report critical of the Australian Government’s “cloud last” policy.

Confirming Ovum’s view, the Victorian EPA (Environment Protection Authority) proudly announced recently that it has just gone live with the conventional on-premise SAP CRM platform.

I fully agree with the comment on Delimiter.com.au: “if you’re deploying a new CRM platform in 2012, you’d be crazy not to look at a SaaS option, when you consider the likely evolution of IT services over the next decade”.

Sorry, but the bureaucrats behind these policies are IT dinosaurs wasting our taxes. Maybe they should have gotten themselves on a Pacific flight across to DreamForce?