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Why Salesforce Is Winning The Cloud Platform War

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300px-Salesforce_Logo_2009The future of any enterprise software vendor is being decided today in their developer community. Alex William’s insightful thoughts on Salesforce Is A Platform Company. Period. underscores how rapidly Salesforce is maturing as a cloud platform.  And the best measure of that progress can be seen in their developer community. (To be clear, Salesforce and the other companies mentioned in this post are not clients and never have been.  I track this area out of personal interest.)

DevZone force.com

The last four years I’ve made a point at every Salesforce Dreamforce event to spend the majority of my time in the developer area.  Watching mini hacks going on in the DevZone, mini workshops, the Salesforce Platform and Developer keynotes over the last few years has been a great learning experience.  An added plus: developers are often skeptical and want to see new enhancements help streamline their code, extend its functionality, and push the limits of the Force.com platform. This healthy skepticism has led to needed improvements in the Force.com platform, including a change to governor limits on Application Programmer Interface (APIs) performance and many other enhancements.  Despite the criticisms of Force.com being proprietary due to Apex and SOQL, the crowds at developer forums continue to grow every year. I’ve started to look at the developer area as the crucible or foundry for future apps.  While the Cloud Expo shows how vibrant the partner ecosystem is, the developer area is where tomorrow’s apps are being coded today. The Force.com Workbook, an excellent reference for Force.com developers, was just released October 1 and DeveloperForce shows how far the developer support is matured in Salesforce.  In addition a new Force.com REST API Developer’s Guide is out just last month. The Journey From Application To Platform In visiting the developer area of Dreamforce over the last four years I’ve seen indications that Salesforce is successfully transforming itself into a cloud platform business:

  • Significant jump in the quantity and quality of developer attendees from 2010 to 2012.  The depth of questions, sophistication of code samples, calls for more flexibility with governor limits, and better mobile support typified these years.
  • Steady improvement to visual design tools, application development environment and support for jQuery, Sencha and Apache Cordova.
  • The steady maturation of Salesforce Touch as a mobile development platform and launch of Salesforce Platform Mobile Services Launched in 2011, this platform continues to mature, driven by developer’s requirements that reflect their customers’ needs for mobility support.  HTML 5 is supported and the apps I’ve seen written on it are fast, accurate and ideal for customer service.  ServiceMax has created exceptional mobile apps including their comprehensive ServiceMax for iPad app on the Force.com platform.
  • 2012: Rise of the Mobile Enterprise Developer.  Salesforce’s enterprise customers in 2009 weren’t nearly as active as they were last year with questions on legacy systems integration and how to create web services capable of integrating customer data.  2011 was a breakout year in mobile app development with 2012 showing strong momentum on mobile web services development.  I expect this year’s Dreamforce developer community to reflect the rapidly growing interest in mobile as well.

How Enterprise Applications Make The Salesforce Platform Work For Them In speaking with Salesforce developers over the years one of my favorite questions continues to be “what is the real payoff of having a native Force.com application in your company?”  Initially I thought this was marketing spin from enterprise software vendors attempting to use features as benefits, however after a closer look it is clear that the platform has significant advantages, especially for any solution requiring global deployments or large numbers of users.  Here is what I found out:

  • The investments Salesforce.com has made in their cloud infrastructure over several years (and continue to make) has resulted in a platform that developers  are leveraging to rapidly deliver enterprise applications that deliver world-class performance, reliability, and security.
  • Of the many native Force.com applications that extend Salesforce beyond CRM, it’s been my experience the most challenging are Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) and contract management.  Creating a single system of record across these two areas is challenging even outside of Force.com, which is why many companies in this space have two entirely different product strategies.  Apttus is the exception as they have successfully created a unified product strategy on Force.com alone.  I recently had the chance to speak with Neehar Giri, President and Chief Solutions Architect.  “Apttus’ strategic decision to deliver our enterprise-class applications natively on the Salesforce platform has allowed us to focus on our customer needs, meeting and exceeding their expectations in both functionality and speed of innovation,” said Neehar Giri, president and chief solutions architect, Apttus.  “We’ve seen the platform evolve rapidly in its capabilities and global scalability.  Apttus’ customers have and continue to benefit from the true multi- tenancy, world class security, reliability and performance of the Salesforce Platform.”
  • Salesforce.com’s multi-tenant architecture allows for optimization of computing resources resulting in savings and significant gains in efficiency for global enterprises even over applications deployed on private clouds.
  • Native Force.com applications share the same security model as Salesforce apps.  Financialforce.com chose to develop their accounting, ordering and billing, professional services automation and service resource planning entirely on the Force.com architecture due to shared master data, multi- tenancy, world class security, reliability and performance.  This shared architecture also benefits enterprise consumers of native applications by providing best-in-class uptime.
  • Native Force.com applications are contributing to greater return on investment (ROI). IT often does not need to manage data integration or sync issues, upgrades to even large numbers of users are easily deployed, and users can remain in a familiar interface.   These benefits support faster and easier deployment as well as rapid user adoption both of which are critical to success and a high ROI for any solution. Enterprise developers have often mentioned the familiar interface and ease of deployment have led to higher rates of adoption than any other approach to delivering new application functionality.
  • Advanced APIs to support integration of legacy applications not on the Force.com platform.
  • Proven ability of Salesforce.com to support global deployments.  The company has expanded its global support centers.  Salesforce.com also publishes real-time statistics on system status: http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/.
  • A continuing acceleration of new capabilities resulting from increasing numbers of developers driving the advancement of the platform through their collective input, suggestions and requirements.
  • Ability to design applications that respond with greater customer insight and intelligence across mobile devices.  ServiceMax has an impressive series of mobile applications that do this today.  I had a chance to speak with David Yarnold, their CEO about his vision for the company.  He wants to give ServiceMax’s customers the ability to deliver flawless field service where every interaction is perfect.  By building on the Force.com architecture he explained how each service customers’ contextual intelligence can be seen in real-time by everyone involved in serving customers.  Clearly ServiceMax is capitalizing on the mobile development platform area of Force.com as well.

Bottom Line: Enabling developers to attain greater revenue growth, while creating an extensive mobile app development platform is further proof Salesforce has turned the corner from being an application company to a platform provider.

(Cross-posted @ A Passion for Research)

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Dreamforecast

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df13For many years I have written a piece that attempts to forecast the major themes of Dreamforce.  I believe I am not always right but the exercise is fun and helps me orient toward what should be happening industry-wide even if it’s not.  This year is no exception.  With no briefing yet from the company, I am unfettered about what I can speculate on.  Had I already been briefed I would be prevented by an NDA and common sense from doing this.

The dominant theme I have witnessed this fall from most of the other front office vendors has regarded marketing.  As I have written before, most of the big guys–Salesforce included—have bought and integrated some very nice marketing solutions into their CRM suites.  In the process, marketing, which was once the most qualitative and least quantitative of the CRM disciplines, has now become the most quantitative while retaining its qualitative distinction.

It’s possible that in future years we might see marketing fragmenting into two arenas for qualitative and quantitative output.  We have a somewhat similar division today between corporate and product marketing but the segmentation I see coming would be between quantitative practice and creative output and the current division includes some of each in each part so there’s some refactoring to be considered.  But enough, that’s a subject for another piece.  Dreamforce.

So, marketing is top of mind therefore I don’t look for Salesforce to make it the centerpiece of their show.  You have to remember that Salesforce made a big deal of the Marketing Cloud last year, after all, so don’t depend on them doing it again.  They seem to take a perverse organizational pleasure in throwing down the glove each year so that other vendors can do their fast follower things.  It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football—it doesn’t get old.

So if not marketing, then what?  Platform.  Around the middle of this year there were a couple of announcements that provide insight.  Both Oracle and Workday made joint announcements with Salesforce that their platforms would interoperate and I conclude from this that platform will be the main attraction.

It makes good sense to me because I think platform-level integration is rapidly replacing application level integration.  When integration meant two apps sharing some data, integration at that level of granularity made perfect sense.  But today integration means constructing end-to-end business process support often using multiple apps that share more than basic data.  In fact what’s basic data for one pair of apps might only be process metadata for another pair of apps further down the line.

This need for process integration puts a great deal of pressure on integration schemes.  Increasingly vendors are building apps on top of over-arching platforms that bake a great deal of process support that is native to them into the apps.  For Salesforce and its Force.com platform, this means workflow, collaboration, social media support, marketing and analytics, and mobility support that enables developers to specify an app once and target generate a runtime for multiple devices.  As I say all this gets baked in simply by building on the Force.com platform and apps built to the platform standards are pre-integrated adding a powerful business incentive.

Here are some impressive stats to back up my opinion.  There are now more than 2,000 ISV developed apps in the AppExchange, most are built on top of Force.com and are pre-integrated by virtue of their adherence to Force.com standards.  There are also more than 100,000 companies using Force.com to build apps and, according to a recent Forrester Wave Report, about 10,000 of them are major enterprises.  Finally, there are three million apps already developed and in use on the Force.com platform.

Here’s a hypothetical example of what all this platform integration could mean in the real world.  A subscription company using Salesforce SFA and Apttus CPQ (configure, price, quote) can complete a deal, send the order configuration back through Salesforce to process the order in Kenandy ERP, and it might bill for the subscription through Zuora’s subscription billing, payments, and finance product.  If the company also sells products in the conventional manner, Zuora can also provide financial support for a subscription sub-ledger for a conventional ERP system.

That’s a simple example too; it goes on and on.  It makes no mention of the myriad support options—ServiceMax for field service automation for instance—and market and sentiment analysis tools available on the platform also.

So I think platform will be a (the) major theme of Dreamforce.  I could be wrong of course but the platform has come a long way in just a few years.  Once the home of a thousand widgets, Force.com is now the redoubt of many robust apps that can run with or without the core CRM.  To continue propelling Salesforce’s growth I think a very easy approach runs through getting more partners and ISVs involved in selling the service that undergirds their solutions.  In a couple of weeks we’ll see what my two cents is really worth.

 

(Cross-posted @ Beagle Research, LLC.)

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News Analysis: Salesforce 1 Signals Support For Digital Business at #DF13

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Salesforce Seeks To Tackle Digital Business At Dreamforce

Over 125,000 virtual and physical registrants descend on San Francisco the week of November 17th for Dreamforce 13, a future of technology meets SXSW event.  One day in advance of the largest enterprise software event of its kind, Salesforce.com announces Salesforce 1 (see Figure 1).  The Salesforce 1 customer platform seeks to address a cadre of emerging digital business requirements that customer centric companies face.

Figure 1. Salesforce 1 Customer Platform Intends to Support The Internet Of Customers

Source: Salesforce.com

SalesForce 1 Reflects Much Needed Refresh Of Existing Platform

The new customer platform includes platform services, platform APIs, and the Apps created from the platform.  Salesforce 1 platform services includes refreshes in Force.com, updates in Heroku, and adds Exact Target Fuel.  As expected, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Exact Target Marketing Cloud, and Apps Exchange sit on top of the salesforce1.com platform.

The key analysis of this release include:

  • Internet of Customers support. Salesforce includes social, mobile, cloud, and connected as the key components for The Internet of Things.  In order to meet the requirements of a third wave of computing that moves from Internet of Things to what Salesforce calls the Internet of Customers, the new platform is designed to support this customer centricity convergence.

    Point of View (POV):
    Constellation sees more than 50B connected devices and at least 150B connected endpoints by 2020.  The opportunity is huge.  While Salesforce.com addresses 3 out of the 5 key components of digital business, the vendor still needs to provide video/unified communications and big data/analytics.  Constellation believes the big data and analytics opportunity is critical to enhancing customer experiences, to benchmarking and brokering data servcies, and to buildoing new business models around big data and analytics.  Customers should encourage Salesforce.com to consider how to enable big data business models in digital business in the next iteration.  Meanwhile, most customers can wait until future releases for video and UC requirements to be met.
  • Next generation apps developer platform. The PaaS layer adds a mobile first orientation that enables a write once and deploy anywhere platform. Developers can now deploy to a range of social, mobile, and connected devices.  The platform services include 10X more API functionality.   Developers can build customer apps, wearable apps, product apps, and salesforce apps.

    (POV):
    Salesforce hopes that its customers and partners will turn to the Salesforce 1 platform to build the next generation of apps.  The new approach through Visual Force reflects today’s responsive design and connected enterprise requirements.  Customers and partners will take advantage of the new data APIs improve queries to core CRM object data.  Metadata and UI APIs improve ability to create new user experiences.  Visual force also allows developers to build to any user interface through a responsive design approach.
  • New mobile apps exchange apps. Salesforce adds 16 new mobile apps from partners.  Partners include Box, Concur, Docusign, Dropbox, eVariant, Evernote, FinancialForce, FileBoard, HP,  Kenandy, LinkedIn, ScanBizCards, ServiceMax, TAS group, Workday, and Xactly.

    (POV):
    AppExchange set the standard for how cloud apps could be marketed and sold inside a vendor ecosystem. Salesforce intends to replicate this success with mobile apps.  Customers will benefit from a vibrant ecosystem of paid, free, and custom developed apps.  There is a huge opportunity to expand out this ecosystem.  The mobile apps exchange catapults  Salesforce.com in direct competition with IBM and SAP for mobile dominance among customers.

 

 

The Bottom Line: The Digital Business Era is Upon Us.

Salesforce is upping the game on what it means for customers and their things.  The platform and messaging expands their addressable market while provides customers an entry point into the digital age.  This digital age must address five generations of workers and customers where age has no impact on digital proficiency.  Moreover, this shift to a digital business world reflects the trends Constellation Research sees in the market where organizations:

  1. Recognize that they no longer sell products and services, as buyers seek experiences and outcomes.
  2. Democratize the data to decisions pathway to enable innovation.
  3. Realize that B2B and B2C are dead. It’s a P2P and M2M world or Internet of Customers
  4. Focus on context as right time relevancy beats real time information overload.
  5. Shift from engagement to mass personalization at scale.

The digital business age is upon us.  Those who fail to adapt will fall behind.

Your POV.

Are you ready to incorporate digital business transformation in your organization’s strategy?  Are you embarking on a digital business transformation?  Let us know how it’s going!  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.

Please let us know if you need help with your Customer Centricity and Digital Business transformation efforts.  Here’s how we can assist:

  • Assessing customer centricity readiness
  • Developing your digital business strategy
  • Connecting with other pioneers
  • Sharing best practices
  • Vendor selection
  • Implementation partner selection
  • Providing contract negotiations and software licensing support
  • Demystifying software licensing

Related Research:

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(Cross-posted @ A Software Insider's Point of View)

News Analysis: Salesforce 1 Signals Support For Digital Business at #DF13 is copyrighted by . If you are reading this outside your feed reader, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

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A Brief History Of Salesforce1

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(note: this is a similar format to my brief history of SCRM, which was widely successful at the time to explain how SCRM came to be.  This is in no way related to Stephen Hawkins’ masterpiece – but you likely already knew that. my official disclaimer of conflict of interests and such is at the bottom of this post)

I let some time go by after DreamForce 2013 so I could cool off from the heated discussions I had with plenty of people.

If I hear one more person tell me that Salesforce1 (S1) is a client-side app, a mobile client, the culmination of Touch (remember that launch? Not many do) or something similar I will scream (like I did the past few days).  And the problem is that Salesforce.com (SFDC) has such a loyal customer and fan base that they will repeat pretty much what they are told (as well as some of the “influencers” and “analysts” out there – unfortunately analysis is no longer a required activity for analysts).  This dichotomy between what it is and what was presented at the show culminated (at least for me) in an exchange between Marc Benioff and myself on Twitter on Thanksgiving Day (Zachary Jeans did a good job of converting it to a Storify stream; you can find it here if you are interested).

That exchange prompted me to write this, I had only been talking to people about it prior, as a way to preempt the question of what is S1 and why there is so much confusion.

salesforce1

You see, there is so much to what S1 is that is not being covered that it is almost an insult to the people that spent 3-5+ years working on getting it done.  To make justice to the journey, and explain it in more detail that you probably have seen, a little history is in order.

(another note: I have down at the bottom a few other articles I considered worth including here that explain it quite well without the long-winded story, feel free to skip it and read those)

The History

SFDC launched in 1999.  At the beginning their call to fame was “No Software” (still hanging around today, ask TooSaasy) back in the days before we had cloud or SaaS.  In those days the rage was Hosted Applications (also known back then as ASP – which was Microsoft’s version, remember Microsoft? It was pretty big back then).

To put it into perspective, this was about the same time Siebel was dominating the “CRM” (read sales force automation mostly with very bad versions of marketing and passable versions of customer service) market; by promising no software to be downloaded (and very low prices to boot) SFDC was able to take a nice piece of the market from Siebel.

Now, keep in mind this was not a cloud application, this was a hosted application.  That means there was a monolithic architecture (mono=single, lithus=stone – meaning an all-in-one comprehensive solution) that run using browsers as interfaces.  To make this happen, things like multi-tenancy (many users running the same application) and multi-instances (many copies of the exact same application) were necessary.  I already covered why multi-tenancy is a horrible idea for real cloud applications (please read it, extend it to multi-instances as well – applies later in the story).

Bottom line: back then this was all we had.  Other vendors like RightNow Technologies, E.piphany, and many others were doing the same: hosted applications that provided a browser interface to monolithic solutions running in the background.

The problem with monolithic architectures is that is a client-server solution through-and-through and it cannot leverage the basic principles of distributed computing well (which is the basis for cloud computing as well as know).  Thus, running monolithic solutions (even via browsers for interfaces) means that innovation, security, integration, and even the ability to scale the solutions are very limited. The cloud computing promises of infinite elasticity, easy integration via platforms, and vetted and tokenized security to ensure privacy and safety is not possible in hosted applications, just like it was not possible in client-server applications without significant investment and unsustainable methods.

Well, I should say not possible to be done easily – but anyone can “pretend” they can do it by creating more and more complex code and solutions.  Removing the flexibility and elasticity of the cloud computing architecture gave us what we called, incorrectly, cloud for a long time: between 1995 and 2005 there were only hosted applications (with very few exceptions coming from smaller vendors) that could not leverage the promise of cloud computing.

SFDC, as well as most other Enterprise Software vendors, was in this camp.

This was very evident to the people who saw SFDC try to build ServiceCloud in the early days: version after version of a monolithic solution that could not integrate with or work as the other solutions deployed by SFDC and could not compete with the then-reigning-champion:  RightNow Technologies (another hosted solution, still today) or even the smaller customer service vendors.

Sometime in 2006-2007 SFDC realized the problem they had and noticed that distributed computing and three-tier cloud computing was starting to be noticed in the Enterprise Software world (some of the early smaller vendors that were creating innovative solutions for Enterprise Software were beginning to leverage the cloud computing model and break their monolithic solutions into tiers, finding ways to deploy them and leveraging the recently launched AWS services from Amazon and Grid computing from other large vendors).

In 2007 SFDC launched Force.com – their first attempt at a platform.  While the migration of force-dot-comexisting code bases was not in the initial plan, the idea was to build a platform layer as part of a three-tier cloud computing model and let developers use that to access SFDC applications.  This was their first attempt at delivering a platform and had, still today has some, many problems: proprietary languages, incomplete service directories, and limited integration into the existing applications of SFDC (SFA and the pretty bad customer service solution back then) were the most noticeable for users; a very complex architecture was the problem for whoever looked behind the browser.

Alas, it was a good first step and it was welcomed by the developers and customers as a way to extend the existing solutions SFDC offered back then.

The Evolution

What follows was a list of steps that helped them realize the potential and power of the platform (trying to shorten this post, which is going to be long anyway):

  • In 2008 SFDC acquires Instranet, a French customer service solution that was very strong in knowledge management but not so much in other areas.  The great part of that acquisition was getting Alex Dayon, a young technologist who understood the power and the concept of the cloud computing model and was willing to rebuild service cloud as a platform-based solution.
  • In 2009 Vetrazzo, an SFDC customer, built ERP functions in force.com in one-third the time and cost of buying an ERP solution to run their organization.  This was not done with SFDC but it was heavily advertised by then once it was done. This proved that motivated customers with access to Force.com could do anything they wanted.
  • In 2009 FinancialForce launched using Force.com as their underlying platform to offer accounting solutions to SFDC customers.
  • In 2010 Kenandy launched using Force.com to create a standard ERP solution, still standing today and used by multiple SFDC customers.
  • In 2010 SFDC launched Chatter, which was initially launched as a hybrid of platform solution and monolithic architecture software. Very important later as it was another data point in showing that platform-only solutions (see above) were better.  It also became the “guinea pig” of migrating SFDC applications to become platform solutions.
  • In 2011 and 2012 SFDC acquired several “dot-com” properties (some of them later became data.com, work.com and desk.com) as well as Heroku (a platform focused on letting developers write smaller apps that could be deployed via web or mobile using different languages)

All these steps were essential to the development of S1, for different reasons:

  • Instranet, which later became a working model of ServiceCloud – the first-one ever to be honest – was a proof-of-concept that platform based solutions could be done.  The development of this solution as ServiceCloud was done (approximately) between 2009 and 2011.
  • Chatter was further proof that monolithic applications were a horrible idea if they were going to be used as a platform.  When Chatter was first launched it could only operate as a stand-alone solution, another entire solution separate from existing applications, and integration into the code-bases of ServiceCloud and SalesCloud was nearly impossible – something that a platform-based service could’ve done with little effort if any.
  • The varied dot-com acquisitions, and platform-based launches by their partners, were important to prove that (since they were real three-tier cloud solutions) platform based services could be used and leveraged across different applications, and to prove that cloud-computing was a far better model than monolithic solutions (I wrote about the acquisition of Assistly, now desk.com, and covered some of these points).

Now it is 2011ish (not very precise, some of the points above came more clear as the development of S1 was underway, but it is the right timeframe going forward).  SFDC already knows that Force.com is not cutting it as a platform (it was proven when they could not launch Chatter as a platform service) and they need to do something.  What follows is one of the hardest decisions to take as an Enterprise Software vendor – but one that will have proven incredible beneficial for SFDC: they needed to re-architect Force.com.  This was the genesis of S1 (not the original name, and certainly not any name that was used during development).

SFDC makes the decision to re-architect the platform that was supposed to be basis for everything they do – and to fully embrace the three-tier model of cloud-computing.  The new platform will not only be extensible, secure, and elastic – it won’t have the interface code it had before (that becomes the true SaaS) and will have to separate the database and connectivity layers form the platform as well (this was the hardest thing to do, but this is another long story).

Among the many things they had realized once they got going was the power it can confer.  Take Chatter for example, one of the best examples of this change.  Chatter was a stand-alone solution that could, in the original implementation, bring some details from files and users into an activity stream.  It was not possible at the beginning to use Chatter for the new ideas that were emerging: make the stream part of all applications and functions, integrate it directly into groups and files to launch communities, and even worse – make it the basis for the social enterprise model that SFDC had then espoused.

chatterChatter was redone – the second time was done as a full platform-based solution: a service-based application that can operate within the platform to serve functions to any other application. The re-launch of Chatter as a platform (done in 2012) was a showcase of the power of what Force.com (then) could do: it quickly became part of everything that SFDC offered, its functions were easily accessible by not only other applications but also by customers, partners, and even competitors (the back story on Chatter and the database licenses it required, and how that became a roadblock for its growth was solved in the deal reached in2013 with Oracle– also another great story for later).

The Proposed Solution

And now we are at the end of 2012, beginning of 2013 with three incredible important accomplishments:

  1. A newly re-architected platform (yet unnamed) that could change the Enterprise Software world
  2. A new version of Chatter that not only serves as the proof of concept for this platform, but also the epitome of the many acquisitions and partnerships it took for SFDC to get to this point.
  3. The burning question of how to deploy and leverage this the best way possible.

Enter S1.

I am not yet sure of how and when S1 was named so, and it does not matter. What matters is what it can do: it has the power to change SFDC from a hosted application (fine, hybrid hosted and cloud application if you prefer) vendor to one of the few solutions in the market with the clout and power to change cloud computing and ensure the adoption by organizations (IBM and Microsoft are the closest – but that is a whole different story also, trying to stay focused).

Here comes DreamForce 2013 – the chance to introduce S1.

During the keynote(s) (there were many more than one) the emphasis for S1 was on the use as a mobile client (it’s an app you can download today in the app store – don’t wait!), as a platform and an app (as if you could be a car and a highway system at the same time), and as many more things than what it is.  My blood pressure rose several points each time someone asked me what I thought of the “new mobile app: S1” or tried to convince me this was the culmination of Touch (that was a release SFDC did to address HTML5 “clients” about two years ago, a total failure – still exists somewhere in the chatter mobile and other apps, but nowhere near what the expectations were at the time).

To be fair, SFDC partners, most of them, I talked to were very smart about it and are already working on very interesting modules that leverage S1. The understanding of a three-tier model for cloud computing and how SFDC is working to incorporate it into their solution was not beyond comprehension by partners, it was poorly explained by SFDC.

The fact that some of SFDC employees were repeating this mantra of “mobile client” was what made it more cumbersome to me: knowing the effort and time it took to build it – why belittle it by calling it a mobile client?

S1 could be a mobile client – well, not really.  It can be displayed via a mobile client (mobile is an interface, not a client) as well as a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone, a partner application, a custom app, an embedded item, a connected machine, even a connected customer and anything else in between.  Because it is a platform, any change you make to a service is IMMEDIATELY reflected in all clients and interfaces – that is the beauty of the three-tier cloud computing model.

There are many benefits to S1 (the platform) that are not being discussed (which I will make the ending of this book-long post).  There are some I will miss in this short post (yes, short – I once wrote a 45+ pages simple explanation of how cloud computing works).

Let me explain some of the things you can get when you stop calling it a mobile client and focus on the power of the platform (and we will extend that to ecosystems of platforms in another post):

  1. Any client, anywhere can access any service offered by the platform.  This means that once you authenticate with a platform, anything else you want to access that is trusted to that platform is also accessible (PaaS to PaaS integration is far safer and scalable than point-to-point integration or security as done today by monolithic solutions)
  2. Any interface (mobile, computer, watch, a “thing” in the internet of things) can access the functions and data (once properly secured and authenticated) and display it – you cannot have an “internet of things” or even an “internet of customers” without an ecosystem of trusted platforms (well, not a sustainable one at least).  This will lead to the rise of “atomized apps” (usually called apps).  These apps are found in mobile devices and are single-function solutions that require no further logic (think about it this way, if your job involves checking people’s credit scores before approving an application for a loan – wouldn’t you prefer to have a simple app that does just that? If your smartphone or table can do it, why not your organization? It now can)
  3. The concept of multi-tenancy finally disappears (yay – I cannot tell you how happy I am) together with the concept of multi-instances.  We move to elastic single-instances with single-tenancy: each customer can have their own service (managed via systems management and metadata quite easily) and instantiate is as many times they need – and make any changes they want in the process. No longer are customers constrained (either in data model or functionality) to what’s offered as they can extend the functionality quite easily by making another service call (to any providers) without having to worry about changing the core service.  (note: vendors will try to tell you how expensive this is as compared to multi-tenancy, but ask you yourself how “cheap” it was to use multi-tenancy and what benefits you as the customer derived from that – or read my previously linked post for that answer).
  4. SFDC can create more modular “API calls”.  They introduced this at the same time as S1 but they failed to mention why this was possible: any API is a library of many calls to different parts of the monolithic application to leverage their functions and data.  API calls require complex transacting for security, scalability, and even integration that can reduce the granularity (read complexity or simplicity – either work – if you prefer) of how you can interact with it.  By using services that leverage tokenized security and inheritances (core benefits of cloud computing) the calls can be far simpler, and far many more, while performing at the same or better level.  Completing more service calls will use fewer resources and time that doing the same via API calls.  Bottom line: you can use more granular functions with far less resources.
  5. Incorporating Enterprise Application Stores (EAS) into their cloud computing deployment will allow any organization to create as many atomized apps as they would like to, thus reducing the complexity of the solutions used by the customers, the training and support costs, and enabling and empowering their customers to build and use their own “custom” version of the Enterprise Software they have running.  The device and operating system they run is irrelevant as long they are supported in the EAS (SFDC announced, very quietly, the first version of their EAS at DreamForce).

The $64,000.00 Question

If you followed all this so far, thank you.  I know it is a bit to consume.

You are probably saying by now, is that Saleforce1? Is the platform they launched and announced as a mobile-client / platform / everything what it is? Is it working yet?

Lots of questions, one simple answer. No.

Let me explain.

Salesforce1 at this point is a very well developed concept, an idea that has been partially implemented and (like i said above) it has a lot of potential.  It has the potential to change how we do Enterprise Software and Cloud Computing forever.  It has the potential to change the way software vendors work with each other.  It has the potential to change how organizations think about ecosystems, about systems of engagement, and about everything from personalization to revenue models.

It has all that potential – but it needs to be realized.  By my estimates, it is about 60-70% complete right now.  Most of the basic APIs have been moved over to the new service-style granular API model and a large number of customers have been running in the new platform without knowing it.

A development environment, an extension of existing Force.com IDE, already exists and service calls are working and available.  There are development manuals and directions, guides on how to do it, and even a “mobile client” (think Chatter mobile and you get a good picture) to allow anyone working with it have a mobile interface to it.  The majority of the pieces are there, but it is not complete.

I talked to a few partners and they had been working with it for some time.  They have been, and continue to, developing new solutions leveraging what Salesforce1 has to offer for some time now.  They have plans, new ideas, and the desire to build new models and new execution paths to fulfill the needs of their customers.  They are working on it and are doing quite well from what i saw.

I also talked to a few, very few, early adopters that are beginning to explore and see what they can do with it.  Admins and Developers are getting a closer-to-the-ground look at the potential and power of the platform and creating very interesting apps and applications for it.

However, none of these are released (there are a few apps in the AppExchange that say Salesforce1 ready – but I have not found any customers using those versions yet).  By my estimates, we are at the very least six months away, but more likely nine-twelve months from having some extraordinary solutions with momentum.  We are one-to-two years away from revolutionizing the way we use those apps, and three-to-five years away from changing revenue and business models to accommodate this new platform (including the core concepts of cloud computing).

Of course, timing will change from industry to industry, and company size to company size.  There are no guarantees of how long it will take to get there, but this is for sure – although Salesforce1 is not 100% ready today, it is excellent progress towards the realization of one of my visions – and the delivery of significant value to the users, customers, and partners.

Time will tell.

This is a very, very brief summary of the many discussions I had over the past few days with different people.  There is a lot more than I can put in here, please contact me if you would like to discuss this in more detail.

I made the offer over Twitter before and I will make it again: I would be more than happy to invest the time and effort in helping anyone understand why S1 is far more than a mobile application or client.

The potential to change the game of Enterprise Software is phenomenal – let’s just hope SFDC does a good job of explaining it.

Benioff Tweet

Yeah, you better believe I will send them. I will share via this blog following…

Thoughts?

Notable Posts (that means I agree with them)
Ben Kepes, amazing cloud dude
Brian Vellmure, analyst extraordinaire
Ken Yeung, interesting and smart reporter
disclaimer: These are my opinions; by no means they are official words from SFDC.  This is my understanding and it is not endorsed by anyone at SFDC.  I have not run this by them, not have I sought approval.  Any errors, omissions, or mistakes are mine and mine only – Safe Harbor does not apply here, I am just telling a story as I see it.  Feel free to correct me in the comments or debate me as well.  I don’t monitor comments, even if WP does, I always approve them.
disclaimer-2: I said this before, Salesforce is one of the smart companies that took me on the offer to become my client.  I am very appreciative for the years we worked together, the incredible access to information, the many debates we held (still hold, never ending) about cloud and software, and their friendship and support for my work.  They also pay for me to attend Dreamforce every year, including hotels, meals, the registration fee, and a few parties here and there as well as a nice analyst swag bag.  I won’t deny it, they spoil me.  However, as you can see throughout the text, that does not mean I will be nice to them or not call them in their mistakes (yes, many through history).  As anybody else I chose to invite to be my client, they listen and sometimes work on their mistakes, sometimes they don’t (but all I can seriously ask is that they listen).  Everything they gave me to date has resulted in a stronger understanding of the potential that Salesforce1 has to change Enterprise Software (and not via more Marketing, as Marc Benioff mentioned in a tweet).  I just hope they realize it, it would make many of my long-held visions begin to come true (you know it is all about me, right?)

A Brief History Of Salesforce1 is copyrighted by . If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Zuora, Intacct Deal a Sign of Things to Come

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Multi-ethnic pile of hands
We’re beginning to see an important differentiation, even a schism, in the enterprise software industry.  It’s been building up for the last seven years and it will burst onto the scene tied in a bow this year.  It’s the separation between conventional software suites and platforms and it is most vividly explained by front to back office integration but also alive and well just in the back office.

Let me digress.

In the conventional software era now heading into twilight, vendors provided more or less soup to nuts solution sets all integrated around proprietary standards, data models, middleware, and the like.  It took a long time for suite vendors to get to that point, developing one application after another, delivering additional functionality to the market year after year.  The process was not without its flaws and immature products occasionally got to market causing much heartburn for early adopters.

Cloud computing and subscriptions are changing all that and the most obvious change agent is Salesforce.com with its Force.com and Salesforce1 platform — Salesforce1 being the superset.

Rather than offering defined solution sets as conventional vendors have done, the Salesforce strategy has been to provide foundation technologies that include the development and maintenance tools you might expect from a solutions provider but with a twist.  The tools sit on a platform that also includes some spiffy data management, workflow, collaboration, social media, and analytics tools.  In short, just what you need to build robust apps these days — cloud or conventional.  Moreover, any developer can make an app that harmonizes with the platform and delivers a robust solution even if it’s version one.

This foundation also gives developers two things they’ve never had.  First, the ability to build apps that automatically integrate with others built to the same platform standards and, second, a way to define apps once and target-generate runtime images for a variety of operating systems.

One of the best examples of this approach is the Salesforce ecosystem and here we rejoin our previous column.

It is more or less expected that Salesforce can easily integrate with the apps in its ecosystem.  So the real proof of the platform is in the ability of non-Salesforce apps built on the platform to integrate with each other.

Earlier this week in Las Vegas, Zuora, a native application on the Force.com platform, announced a deepening relationship with Intacct a financial applications provider in the Salesforce ecosystem.  IntAcct is not a native Salesforce application set meaning it has its own cloud but no matter.  Another attribute of the platform is its API set designed precisely to enable the kind of integration just announced.

We’re not done yet.

Zuora is one of the leading providers of specialized services that help subscription companies and subscription groups within conventional companies, to account for the sometimes squirrely (that’s a technical term) business processes needed to correctly manage customer orders, configurations, billing, payment, and finance.  I can’t find an accurate number of Zuora customers but I can say they have offices in the U.S. and Europe as well as $132.5 million in venture capital.  The press release says Intacct has more than 7300 customers including startups and public companies.

My point is that the platform is not some gimmick for small companies or cloud only companies or front office only companies.  The cloud is for every company, everywhere.  This is made abundantly clear by this announcement by two back office companies this week.

This announcement is another proof point for the platform but also a major validation for Zuora that, by this integration, is enabling Intacct customers to build and deploy hybrid business models for its customers that include conventional and subscription businesses.

This is a big deal because it adds significant subscription functionality that will enable Intacct’s users to make better decision because they’ll have more information available.  And that information will not come at the cost of storing customer data in two locations and hoping to be able to synchronize everything.  The two systems will operate as a single entity for those companies sponsoring hybrid business models that are in need of hybrid accounting.

Obviously, the deal gives Zuora a universe of 7300 new customers but it also gives Intacct an easy way to deliver major new functionality with no drama.  That’s why I think this is a milestone event.

(Cross-posted @ Beagle Research, LLC.)

Zuora, Intacct Deal a Sign of Things to Come is copyrighted by Denis Pombriant. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Back Office Perks Up

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cloud-computing-2What’s going on in the back office?

That normally staid bastion of conventional computing is perking up taking on subscriptions and cloud computing like candy.  It used to be that when you thought about back office and cloud in the same thought you also thought about NetSuite.  Truthfully you still do, they’ve been at it a long time and have produced a solid and well articulated suite of back office ERP, finance, and accounting software (and more) that runs a lot of companies, especially the international variety that keep books in multiple languages and currencies.

But over the last ten days other companies have announced partnerships and solutions that both challenge NetSuite’s position and point to an important new era in computing.

The new era has been percolating through all of this century.  Ever since Salesforce starting selling “no software,” cloud computing and subscriptions have been stealing a march on conventional, expensive, and bloated on premise software.  Each year these solutions became more powerful and ubiquitous.  First they supported other subscription companies, then all sorts of companies, and now, with the advent of the platform, cloud computing has come to the development suite and the back office.

The back office!  Ten years ago the mantra was “Not with my data!” but something happened.  Certifications sprouted and cloud became normal and safe and with Salesforce’s leadership, kind of cool.  On the back office side, NetSuite carried a similar message to the point that today cloud and accounting are no longer words that, when spoken together, sufficient to punch your ticket to a long rest in a rubber room.

The last week has seen a breakout of sorts for subscriptions, cloud, accounting, ERP, and platform computing.  Zuora and Intacct announced a widening partnership that will deliver Zuora’s subscription billing, payments, accounting, and financial management solutions to Intacct’s 7300+ cloud accounting customers.  Be aware that cloud and subscription are not the same.  Intacct has been successfully delivering cloud based accounting services and giving NetSuite its fair share of competition for many years.

The addition of subscription power from Zuora raises the bar to enable Intacct’s conventional customers with subscription aspirations to support what can best be called hybrid business models.  At the same time, the announcement also shines a light on Salesforce’s platform strategy.  Zuora is a native application on Force.com and Intacct has developed powerful integration with the platform in general and the joint announcement says they’ll double down on that integration.  For Zuora it means 7300 new prospects, for Intacct it means a major capability upgrade without breaking a sweat.  But we’re not done.

Also today, FinancialForce, a native accounting system on the Force.com platform just announced their entry into the ERP market with FinancialForce ERP.  As a native application on the Force.com platform, FinancialForce has completed the circle of front to back office solutions that began with Salesforce.  With all of the available solutions, a company of any size or complexity can now support all of its enterprise IT in the cloud and via subscriptions.

I think the biggest news in all this is what will happen to conventional IT in the years ahead.  Pessimists say that IT will wither as significant chunks of functionality decamp for the cloud but I disagree.  IT has always been a major component of a company’s secret sauce.  If garden-variety accounting systems, even those that support subscriptions, can be off-loaded to the cloud that’s fine.

As more enterprise solutions head for the clouds and budget ratios turn from capital expenses to operational, we should see a renaissance of in-house application development which will, importantly, drive new business processes, especially in mobile apps that will help users do more and better business and do it faster.  That’s where the secret sauce is and will remain for the foreseeable future.  Time to embrace it.

These foundational changes come at an opportune time as prognosticators think about what it will mean to have 50 billion devices hanging off the Internet in 2020.  Devices will increasingly be non-human consumers of goods and services (especially for restocking) and producers of data and information.  Their transactions will take fractions of a second, be automatic, and require the attention of the infrastructure we are building now with cloud and subscriptions.

So the significance of these announcements together with things that have been coming out in the last year all point to an important milestone.  Conventional applications managed data but the new stuff with platforms, front and back office integration, workflow, and social media all point to building and managing better business processes.  I think we’re close to the end of a long wave of technology invention and at the beginning of an era of its consolidation and application.

(Cross-posted @ Beagle Research, LLC.)

Back Office Perks Up is copyrighted by Denis Pombriant. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Platforms: What FinancialForce, Xactly, and Hubspot Understand

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Platforms – can’t live with them… pass the potatoes.

I know, we all hate platforms.

The crux of the problem is explaining what a platform is and how it works, I can write for ages about the details and go into nitpicking details – and never publish.  The closest I got to it was the post I did when SFDC announced Salesforce1 (the platform, not the message of a mobile client attempt at confusing users).

But the issue remains: how to explain platforms easy and simple?

Then, it hit me as I was sitting at conference after conference these past weeks: use examples.  I collected some of the most obvious ones these past months and I want to share them with you to try to elucidate on what platforms are and how they work.

Defining a Platform

If there was ever a fool’s errand it is to try to get y’all to agree on what a platform is.  I know better than that.

However, before we start I want to give you a short version of  what I call platforms (and what you should also, if you want to be right… ok, ok, just messing with you…).

First a proper definition, but not from Webster’s (who misses the point by simply stating it is an OS – which is a very basic form or platform, but not related to cloud computing), but form Wikipedia (after disambiguation, ended up in computing platform) that says:

A computing platform is, in the most general sense, whatever pre-existing environment a piece of software is designed to run within, obeying its constraints, and making use of its facilities. Typical platforms include a hardware architecture, an operating system (OS), and runtime libraries

Some of the critical pars of this definition are: environment, self-contained, and with specific resources to leverage the environment at least as I read it, but I may be biased. Also, by “hardware architecture” I interpret Cloud Computing in the context of this post and my future writings.

In cloud computing, a hardware / software architecture combination, the platform is the middle layer that provides essential, secure, scalable, and repeatable services that are then leveraged by the SaaS and IaaS layers to run operations.  Think of it as a “traffic cop” that ensures that the right element (data, function, integration point, more) goes where it is supposed and ends up in the right place, after providing it with the right resources to get there.

The easiest way to think about a platform (PaaS) in cloud computing is to look at the requirements:

  • A component of a three tier open cloud architecture (entails being able to communicate with any IaaS or PaaS or SaaS component directly without point-to-point integration) – see figure below

Slide3

  • A collection of functions delivered like a service (see some of the examples in the picture above); if you want to call them APIs, do so – but make sure they are open, discoverable, and secure as services at the very least (there is lot more about this coming in future posts).

I am in awe of the many versions and approaches I am finding (as well as failed attempts).  I will highlight a few, but know that I’m merely pointing you to some of the most mature I found; there are many, many others not included here (I cannot cover everything in one post, sorry).

The Platform-to-Platform Play

FinancialForce.is a very interesting play on platforms, as they are both an application leveraging Force.com (Salesforce1) as a platform and a platform on their own.  Depending on what solutions you implement you are either using a service that is delivered on top of Force.com (Salesforce1) or their own platform that also connects to Salesforce1 (Force.com) to provide additional services.

As you see in the chart above, there is an inherent element to cloud-based platforms that is to connect to other platforms and FinancialForce has done this quite well.  By establishing these connections between platforms they both deliver a value add via  new platform that can easily integrate into exiting ones as well as leverage previous investments the customer may have made.

This is the way organizations will leverage the solutions and power provided them by vendors in the cloud: through an aggregation of multiple services delivered by a myriad of platforms providers.

The traditional role of the vendor as a seller of software that does everything end-to-end is coming to an end and being replaced by vendors that connect platforms and offer services on top of them.

The Leveraged Outcome Play

The second example is something that Xactly showcased earlier this year: a new service based on the outcomes generated by the established service they provide.

If you don’t follow Xactly they have a service that helps organizations manage their compensation strategies and tactics.  They do this by delivering data points showing  what others are doing (anonymously) and use that information, together with real-time performance data, to manage compensation for sales people.

In a world that is dramatically changing the value and purpose of the salesperson, Xactly offers organizations an easy way to manage their performance and to reward the right behaviors with proper compensation dynamically and flexibly.

One of the things that Xactly noticed was that they had access to reams of data about more than compensation: who the people were, how they acted, what they did and didn’t do, what worked and didn’t, etc.  All that data started to show insights that were too useful to be abandoned.  Xactly at first used them to share with their clients, in a non-methodic manner, as casual insights.

Along the way they figured two things: one, the insights could be a  product once they figured a method to share them consistently with customers who wanted to know not only how they compared to others, but also what worked and didn’t for others.

Second, it was not only that specific data that made sense-  but the model.  The model of collecting data, any data, from transactions and operations as part of cloud-provided services.  This model, together with the data and the insights, became the basis for a new service they provided via their existing platform by simply leveraging the outcomes and the results of the other services.

This is what platforms do divinely well and easy: extend what has been done into many different new directions with minimal effort.

The Extending Functionality Play

Another platform example that I noticed recently was Hubspot.  At their recent user conference they announced that in addition to the Marketing Automation functionality they were already offering they would begin to offer more basic CRM functionality (related to Sales and Pipeline management as well as contact management).

This was partly led by requests from their clients and partly by them noticing that the data was the same and if they could add a few more reporting and operations functions to the cadre of services their platform offered they could extend the functionality of their platform – but more importantly do so in a way that delivered what customers wanted to see.

Hubspot focus was not only on the data they could add to their existing database, but more on the functions that their customers could not complete with other offerings as well as extending the functionality of their functional and reporting services.

By extending the functionality of their platform (adding new services) they were able to deliver more value to their customers and also showed them how easy it was to do so, enabling future requests for added functionality to come in to them and they can fulfill them – continuing the cycle.

Other Examples

One more place where I am seeing the rise of platforms play is in the CRM Idol competition.  Now on its fourth year, we are used to seeing the contest showcase the main technical challenges, and solutions, offered by new and starting CRM vendors.

During the previous years we saw plenty of focus on social, analytics, big data, marketing automation, and small medium businesses – but this year we are seeing a lot more focus on delivering all these solutions as platforms or even as services for other platforms.

While I cannot name names yet (as the contest is still underway and I cannot show favoritism) you can see the list of participants and draw your own conclusions.  However, know that I am more impressed by the technology deployment approach via platforms this year than at any other time.

Please keep in mind that these are just a few examples of what I am seeing as there are many other plays I didn’t highlight (but will going forward).

OK, your turn – flame on (I feel so old saying that)… Troll on… whichever you prefer.  Tell me what I missed and what you noticed.  Caveat: if you are vendor touting your own solution, likely that your comment will be “spamatized”.

What do you say?

disclaimer: as with any post mentioning vendors, I want you to know that FinancialForce and Hubspot were never (or are not now) clients.  They either paid expenses for conferences and events, or invited me to dinners and such.  Xactly is a current client.  Some of the CRM Idol vendors are or were clients also.  As always client status is not indication of inclusion, nor is inclusion in this post something I do for them to hire.  I’d be very surprised if they were to hire me because of this short mention in a blog post – but stranger things have happened and if this does I will update this post.
 

(Cross-posted @ thinkJar)

Platforms: What FinancialForce, Xactly, and Hubspot Understand is copyrighted by Esteban Kolsky. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.


Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by FinancialForce.com, Salesforce.com and Workday.

Bringing Social Tools Into Sales

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I’m at Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce event in London today, where there’s a lot of talk about Chatter, the vendor’s social collaboration platform. There are several announcements coinciding with the event, in particular Chatter Mobile, which takes Chatter out onto iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Android. Also of interest is the news that social stream aggregator Seesmic now integrates Chatter as one of its feeds.

With these announcements, Chatter is starting to grow up and demonstrate how social networking tools can actually deliver business benefits if they have the right capabilities and are tuned to the needs of an enterprise environment.

Chatter (as I’ve covered here previously) allows users to track data as well as people: both internally, for example open support cases, credit alerts, regularly updated documents such as slide decks, price lists and commission plans; and also externally, for example updates to contacts from Salesforce.com’s recently acquired JigSaw application, which ‘crowdsources’ up-to-date information about contacts and organisations.

One of the most compelling attributes of Chatter is that it makes real-time communication and collaboration really easy — especially in comparison to current enterprise collaboration tools, which rely heavily on email and on shared web pages. Salesforce.com has customer case studies, as well as its own experience internally, that show that it’s fairly typical for sales teams to see email traffic cut in half when they introduce Chatter.

Staying on top of social network information streams is often a challenge, and in a business context it’s important that key messages are spotted and acted on. There are a number of different ways of filtering the information streams in Chatter so that a worker can home in on the conversations and data feeds that are important to them. I’m told that early adopters have especially welcomed the recent introduction of groups, making it possible to tune into the conversations from certain teams.

The big advances with Chatter compared to more conventional collaboration platforms are how easy it is to put messages into the stream for collaboration purposes. This is partly because Chatter is integrated into the Salesforce.com application interface (or Force.com UI), and partly because the short message format is much easier both to compose and to read. Dropping in links and attachments is really easy too.

The mobile application adds to that effect. It looks especially impressive on a touch screen device (so here’s another reason to equip your sales team with iPads), incorporating many of the time-saving touch-screen gestures that Apple has made so familiar to many of us in the past couple of years. But it’s also important that these smart devices have built-in capabilities such as cameras, which can be adapted to the needs of the application. For example, sharing a quick visual sketch of an idea is as simple as scribbling it on a scrap of paper, photographing it and posting it to your Chatter stream. No more faffing about with inadequate whiteboard applications, just jot, click and go.

The next phase is to integrate the corporate Chatter stream with other conversations happening in the outside world. Loic LeMeur, founder and CEO of Seesmic, joined Marc Benioff on stage today to show off precisely that capability. Seesmic already aggregates more than 40 social networks and geolocation applications. Now it aggregates Chatter so that sales, marketing and support staff who need to see what people are saying out in the outside world can do that alongside their Chatter stream and bridge across different streams when necessary. Available as a browser app this week, the app will be on the iPad soon and Android next.

Bringing Social Tools Into Sales is copyrighted by Phil Wainewright. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.


Dreamforce 2010

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Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference opened last Tuesday morning to the driving beat of WILL.I.AM and the showmanship of its flamboyant CEO Marc Benioff. Dreamforce is always a lively event but this year the energy level was over the top and only overshadowed a little by Benioff’s much discussed rainbow socks. I suppose you have to accept a bit of the hype as a sign of Salesforce’s and Benioff’s continuing role as lead evangelists for the rapidly expanding “cloud” movement. Cloud computing and its sister “everything as a service” are a part of the leading IT trends today and a key element in most of the other key trends, everything from mobile to social business. Okay, back to the subject at hand, Dreamforce 2010. To make this easier let’s break the week and conference up into these section: 1. What’s new in the existing apps and platform, 2. What are the new products, 3. Other happenings of interest.

Before we dive in though, maybe it would be useful to look at Salesforce as a company because maybe they are at a different point in their evolution than many believe…or said another way, your perception of them may still be tied to a company image that is rooted in their start up past. First don’t get me wrong, they are still helping to lead an important change in the IT landscape, it’s just that they are much more mature as a company and because of that they have to make product and business decision differently than an immature software vendor. As an apps vendor Salesforce is a mature vendor and has a mature, 10+ year old sales force automation product. Other parts of the product are less mature of course, but in all, the CRM apps are at a point where customers need incremental improvement, not radical, discontinuous innovation and change, something Salesforce.com is delivering. There was a time a few years ago when it was not rolling out as many incremental CRM product innovations, a time when it was focused more on the new platform offering, but that time has clearly past. At a $1.7+B subscription run rate, Salesforce.com is a major software vendor and from a business model standpoint the apps end of the business is established and stable, with nice, continuous double digit growth. The platform side of the business is somewhat less mature and the model and products are changing more. Salesforce.com is also expanding its business model to include more ways of creating revenue streams and experimenting with partnerships, acquired products and ways to expand and grow a healthy ecosystem.

What’s new with the existing apps and platform? Salesforce.com a few years ago started breaking out the products into “clouds”, which is actually an easy way to look at the product portfolio, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Collaboration Cloud, Data Cloud, etc. For the base product clouds the current release, Summer 10, added new functionality and across the board Salesforce.com is calling them 2nd generations of its product set, or Cloud 2. The following slide shows the complete portfolio:

Chatter or the collaboration cloud got a lot of attention during Dreamforce this year and for the second year in a row (it was announced last year at Dreamforce 09). In fact Salesforce.com made extensive use of Chatter during the conference (over 14K users and 740+ groups) and showcased several customers that have deployed Chatter including Dell. Dell has over 100K users on Chatter and attributes its successful deployment to three things, training for all users, alignment with the corporate communications group and executive support and buy in (sounds like a solid implementation approach). One new use case for Chatter, by the way, is in the Service Cloud, which now has integration to Chatter for escalations management and collaboration. For internal collaboration Chatter seems to be getting a lot of attention from existing Salesforce customers. For me, there seem to be two limitations to the current release of Chatter, the biggest being the fact that it is organization limited and cannot connect to anyone outside of the “firewall”. The other issue is something that I’m becoming more and more convinced will be a limitation for adoption of activity streams in general, that is the idea that everyone will be willing to use a tool that is outside of their normal enterprise SW / workflow. While I think many will be willing to use the tool, for some the interruption to daily workflow won’t be comfortable and at worst will cause them to reject using the tool. I believe that over time we must embed activity streams at the point of work for them to gain widespread adoption, but that’s just my opinion at this point and maybe Salesforce and other activity stream vendors will prove me wrong.

The Service Cloud 2 also got a fair bit of air time with a few interesting new features and integrations. Salesforce.com for Facebook, which has been out for a couple of years added several key features and most importantly is tightly integrated with the Service Cloud. It’s Twitter integration also got a facelift and is tightly integrated into the Service Cloud. One of the criticisms of the Service Cloud product, that it didn’t accommodate high volume call centers seems to be closer to a non-issue with the addition of a console for high volume call centers in the latest release. Overall the Service Cloud is now the fastest growing Salesforce product at 106% y/y growth. Motorola is one of the customers making use of the Service Cloud with over 600 agents now on the product.

As you would expect a lot of the real action at Dreamforce was focused around the new “stuff, which mostly affected the Force.com platform. In summary those announcement were: a new database cloud, database.com; the acquisition of Heroku, a Ruby on Rails development platform; the availability of VMforce announced earlier this year; and the data cloud built from the acquisition of Jigsaw, also earlier this year. The one outlier announcement was a joint one with BMCsoftware of a new product built natively on force.com, Remedyforce, more on that in a minute.

Database.com and the database cloud is an interesting announcement on several fronts. In the simplest form, developers should find the offering of interest since many are looking to deploy apps that provide ubiquitous access, multi-device, multi-OS, etc. Having a cloud ready database to use for development could speed up that process. Database.com is the latest in Salesforce utilizing assets that they already had developed by putting a public front end on the asset and offering it as a product. If you think about it, when Salesforce.com started in 1999, building applications for SaaS was new and they had no available cloud platforms including the database tier. They had to develop all of these assets and now that they are mature Salesforce is opening them up for other ISV’s to use, starting with the Force.com platform and now with the Database.com offering. Database.com supports any development platform, any development language and any device. With the offering ISV’s get a scalable multi-tenant database with automatic upgrades, tuning and backup. Pricing for the new offering is the first 100K records / 50K transactions free then $10 per month per 100K records. Here are a couple of screen shots:

In an attempt to open up Force.com to other more popular development languages Salesforce.com did a partnership with VMware earlier this year to incorporate VMware’s Spring Java platform into it’s Force.com offerings as VMforce. That product is now available in Beta. Continuing in the vein of opening up to more popular languages Salesforce.com announced its intent to acquire Ruby on Rails platform company Heroku for $212 M. This in my opinion is one of the most exciting announcements of the week. Ruby is by far the hottest language these days and will open up Force.com to a lot of ISV’s in my opinion.

One of the new clouds that joined the Salesforce.com sky is the Data cloud, based on Jigsaw, a product acquired earlier this year. Jigsaw provides crowdsourced contact data and is now tightly integrated into Salesforce.com. With millions of contacts and a self cleaning data set, Jigsaw embedded in the Sales Cloud could prove a very welcome and useful addition, providing significant value for sales people on the go.

On the partner front Salesforce.com extended its relationship with BMCsoftware. Last year at Dreamforce BMC announced that it planned on building a native Force.com app from its Remedy franchise. This year they jointly announced a new product offering, Remedyforce which will be sold by both companies. This go to market model provides BMC an excellent distribution channel through the proven salesforce.com direct sales force and provides salesforce.com an interesting test case for a model that could be expanded to include other ISV’s. In fact this could signal the addition of a new business model leveraging the growing partner ecosystem although when asked in my meeting with him, EVP of emerging products, Brett Queener denied any such plans at present.

On day two of Dreamforce, Wed morning, I had a somewhat disconcerting experience that ended up being directly related to the Wed pre-show. As I was leaving my hotel I entered the elevator by myself and a few floors later the elevator stopped and to my surprise G.W Bush walked on the elevator. Now remember this is at 7am and I’m completely without caffeine. I didn’t collect myself soon enough to say anything but I was surprised that Bush was sans entourage so I began to doubt my sighting, I mean I suppose someone could look exactly like the ex-president. He got off the elevator ahead of me, was greeted in the lobby and quickly ushered into a limo. Of course later that morning during the pre keynote show out walks Bush… Okay, actually a very good Bush impersonator but I have to say, he looks real, even close up.

Just a few other points of interest and I promise I’ll stop rambling. The Dreamforce concert act this year was Stevie Wonder and as anticipated he put on a great show. What was not anticipated though was his appearance on stage with Marc during what was supposed to be ex-president Bill Clinton’s keynote. It seems that Clinton’s flight was delayed by bad weather and so Stevie agreed to join his friend Marc for a little Q&A. Stevie’s warm, genuine and caring nature really came through in what was a truly amazing session. I Tweeted many of his comments so you can check them out or check out some clips on YouTube. When Clinton showed up Marc asked Stevie to introduce him. Clinton opened with a great quote: “I’ve been a mediocre musician all my life and I never dreamed that Stevie Wonder would open for me”. I won’t recap all of Clinton’s speech here, but I will say he continues to be a great speaker and his message really resonated with me. The concept for the speech was built around what Clinton identified as the three biggest issues facing the world today, that it is unequal, unstable and unsustainable. Take a look here for some clips of his speech.

Dreamforce 2010 is copyrighted by Michael Fauscette. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Applications that are Social

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I’m spending the week at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference (more on that in a post coming shortly) and at the partner keynote on Tuesday I watched a product demo that got me thinking about this concept that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, applications that are social. Actually what I said was that instead of social applications we need to move to a place where all applications are inherently social. We have some distance to travel before we can get to a place where every application is social, but I’m starting to see some good examples of applications that incorporate social as a core part of the functionality and applications that are social are pretty compelling when you start to understand what they can do.

Take Concurforce as an example. Concurforce is built on the Force.com platform and provides an interesting intersection of two business processes that increase in value when mashed up and socialized. Because the app is built on Force, it gets access to the Salesforce Chatter employee social network (ESN) tool and Concur does a good job on opening it up to serve as a way to collaborate around travel and expenses. The app goes beyond that though, and adds maps trip details to sales / prospect data, as well as creating a single experience for managing travel and expenses. From a trip planning perspective it let’s Salesforce SFA users plan sales trips, capture expenses (and manage this aspect of the cost of the sale), and even collaborate on mundane things like dinner reservations. From a productivity perspective putting the two processes together saves time but also helps maximize the effectiveness of every trip.

Concurforce isn’t the only example of an application that is social though. Salesforce / Unit4 joint venture company FinancialForce also leverages the fact that it’s built on the Force platform to get inherent social capabilities. Now you might question why ESN features are so important for financials but don’t forget that finance departments have lot’s of need to be collaborative both with each other and with other departments and with clients. The monthly and yearly close process, for example, is a very social process that benefits greatly from having an embedded ESN. FinancialForce also offers a professional services automation solution and uses the Chatter ESN to provide the necessary collaborative features and functions that are absolutely critical for managing client engagements and delivering projects.

The transition to applications that are inherently social will take some time, but it is a reality today.

(Cross-posted @ Michael Fauscette)

Applications that are Social is copyrighted by Michael Fauscette. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.

Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

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