More than 20,000 sales professionals from some 87,000 companies that use Salesforce's cloud-based customer relationship management solution gathered at the Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco, California to be present at the Dreamforce Conference from 6-9 December, 2010.

Cornerstone Information Systems, which has used Salesforce very effectively by reducing costs by 45 percent, reducing their sales cycle by 35 percent, and by driving their deal size 300 percent, also featured and presented.

Allison Montgomery from Acxiom (News - Alert), a creator of global interactive marketing services, and Tony Rodoni, regional vice-president, corporate sales, from Salesforce presented at the session titled "Every Sales Process is Different: Learn How to Best Leverage Salesforce" on December 8th. Alan Minton, senior vice president of marketing was Cornerstone's featured speaker at the Salesforce conference

Minton said, "Cornerstone offers cloud-based solutions as well so we understand the value that Salesforce's solution provides. Use of the Salesforce product has allowed us to have real-time visibility into campaign effectiveness, better track new leads, and penetrate into new markets."

Mat Orrego, president of Cornerstone spoke of the success that they had by using Salesforce, "We adopted Salesforce in 2000 and have relied on it not just for managing our sales contacts but for tactics that help us maximize our sales force while reducing overhead,"

Orrego further added, "The efficiencies we have gained from Salesforce have allowed us to manage 4 times as many customers than our biggest competitor with less than half the staff."

The Dreamforce Conference celebrates cloud-based computing which allows companies to use business tools that are secure and online based, thus reducing, or eliminating, the need to download, install and maintain software and hardware in-house. This is the eighth annual conference and has more than 325 educational sessions, hands-on labs, and 250 business leaders offering best practice expertise in using cloud-based solutions.

Founded in 1992, Cornerstone Information Systems is a privately held company based in Bloomington, Indiana with personnel in eight locations worldwide.

In a related news release, Cornerstone Information Systems announced a solution to automate the reconciliation of corporate “ghost card” data, which is one of the most dreaded and time-consuming travel and accounting requirements.