Enterprise hits and misses – Tech companies respond to exploits, Amazon flexes for the holidays, and on-the-ground events get a safety playbook

Lead story – Are on-the-ground events viable? Salesforce reveals lessons

One of my core pieces of advice for enterprise event planners borders on the obvious: move away from big annual shows, and give regional events a go. Salesforce was already on this, via a smaller Dreamforce in San Francisco and now, another in New York City.

Stuart breaks out the event lessons in Salesforce’s New York state of mind – Dreamforce shows real world events can be done in the US and here’s how.

Stuart shares the Salesforce method:

That’s where the next phase of Salesforce’s Dreampass offering comes in. Actually Benioff referred several times to what he called Safety Cloud, but the official branding appears to remain Dreampass. Regardless of the nomenclature, the idea remains the same – to enable organizations to create more trusted in-person events by:

• Enabling organizations to scale collection and verification of COVID status.
• Providing integrations with testing vendors, such as pharmacy chain CVS, as well as partners such as ‘touchless travel ID firm CLEAR and the non-profit public trust initiative The Commons Project.
• Facilitating the creation of agile communications to keep event attendees informed about procedures and policies relating to events.
• Centralizing data, including event registration, customer information and COVID status, for each attendee, then generating a secure multi-factor credential for the event.

Then there is the matter of verifying safety credentials, without compromising privacy. Stuart:

In addition, the recent acquisition of Credential Master is underpinning a move into Verifiable Credential Management (VCM) which allows partners to integrate with Dreampass and the wider Salesforce platform.

Some of these tools are Salesforce-specific. The methods are not. We’re still awaiting the curveballs of Omicron on the spring event calendar. But there’s no question that on-the-ground events are best served by regional approaches (limiting air travel, particularly international), and turning testing and/or vaccine validation into certified/trusted/digital routines. I still believe this should be paired with a superior virtual/hybrid approach, but that’s another story. (The…