Unemployment hovers at 10%, and everyone this side of the White House thinks that it will be there indefinitely.

It won’t feel that way this week at Dreamforce , salesforce.com’s annual conference.

In San Francisco, with the State of California on perpetual bankruptcy watch and its own unemployment numbers at 13%, the high tech boom is in full reincarnation.  Traffic clogs Highway 101, the ferry buzzes from Marin, and BART dumps wide-eyed capitalists into the city by the bay.

In San Francisco they can’t hire fast enough.

Dreamforce is perhaps the best representation of the latest tech boom, and in my mind, it indicates a trend which is at the heart of our troubling unemployment numbers.  Yes, salesforce.com is doing an end-around on the corporate software market, and yes, Marc Benioff is reaching new heights as a gargantuan, philanthropic, shrewd CEO, driving a company whose stock price is reminding us of the dot com days.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that salesforce.com’s customers are transforming their businesses.  The point is that the Cloud, for all of its hype, is allowing organizations to streamline processes, exploit new opportunities, and measure tangible ROI.  The point is that companies are able to flatten their management structures and gain efficiencies in their processes by simply creating transparent access to data and collaboration–now.  Not in a year, not in 18 months.  Now.  At Bluewolf, we call it “continual stream of value.”

Guess what that means?  That means knowledge labor is in demand, and manual task labor is getting squeezed out.  Brutal as it may sound, CEO’s are reticent to hire, precisely because they believe that technology can replace manual tasks in their companies; precisely because they are gaining access to information—themselves as CEO’s–that they once relied on droves of employees to provide.

The Cloud and salesforce.com are key drivers in this sea change.

At Dreamforce, nearly 20,000 knowledge workers will descend upon the Moscone Center, looking for ways to transform their businesses.  Most come believing that they can use salesforce.com to quickly automate tasks and bring further transparency to their key performance indicators.  Most will spend NONE of their time learning about the underlying technology (Oracle OpenWorld is the opposite—it is ALL about the technology); rather, they will discover solutions and ideas that can immediately impact their companies.

These, my friends,  are the knowledge workers.  Now it’s up to our great country to educate– and employ– more of them.

See you in SF.