Marc Benioff is talking about Salesforce.com. I’ll skip transcription of why Salesforce is so great, blah blah blah.

“We used to get releases every four years at Oracle; we’ve had 25 major releases in 8 years at Salesforce.”

After a long presentation on why Salesforce.com is so great, the SVP of Platform has taken the stage to talk about technology stuff.

We’re now looking at a custom application called “Cinema Management” written by Dolby to manage aspects of theatre management. Dolby wanted to do something custom for the UI, so they built a custom UI on top of Salesforce’s APIs.

So far, the new application seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with Flash. The graphs they’re showing are generated by Google’s Chart API. Ah, wait, they use an embedded Flash movie player.

Ah… now they’ve launched an off-line version of the custom Dolby application that works off-line with AIR. It uses SQLite to store all data off-line. Once you connect back on-line, it automatically synchronizes with the server (there’s no sync UI, it just magically happens).

Wow, that’s pretty cool.

We’re now doing a Q&A with Kevin Lynch and Marc Benioff.

Q: Do businesses care about the quality of UX in enterprise internal apps?

A: Consumers are growing to expect rich experiences, so they are demanding it of CIOs. The question is not if they should care, it’s about how quickly they can do it. We want to enable rapid creation of applications with compelling user interfaces.

Q: Do you see any metrics about how to measure the improvement of productivity [associated with high-quality UIs]?

A: Adoption. CIOs have been dealing with lack of adoption, so we give you tools to monitor usage to determine if users are actually adopting the application. We check to see what people are actually using. Users can also rate the applications.