Monday, November 03, 2008
Narinder Singh
In today's keynote and as reported recently, salesforce.com released the capability to create and run web based apps available to those outside of your company. There were a ton of cool demonstrations shown today and we built many of them (Harrah's, Facebook). We'll highlight those in our Dreamforce Central Blog, but we want to focus on a more subtle point - the rate of innovation and the pace at which it impacts customers.
1. The high rate of innovation of salesforce.com (and other cloud providers) - Two years ago it was Apex code, that allowed real business logic; last year it was Visual Force, that allowed full control over the user experience; this year they announce salesforce sites; allowing you take your apps and expose part or all of them to web users. No enterprise software vendor has come close to matching this pace over the same period of time.
2. The rate at which innovations actually impact customers - In typical on-premise software, even cool new things will require a generation to get into the hands of customers. Already 11 million of Apex Code and more than 50,000 Visual Force pages have been written by salesforce.com customers. We have used both with more than 50 enterprise customers in mission critical apps.
The fact that these two factors can occur while reducing overall IT costs at first glance seems like black magic. But this is in fact the ultimate testament to how different cloud computing is from old world and how far Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and others have to come. You can get started with trying out salesforce and getting started with a trial of all of this in 60 seconds.
How long will it take the others to match that? We have always been fans of cloud computing, but even I sit back stunned at how far the gap is between the old world and the new
Labels: Amazon Web Services, facebook, Force.com, harrah's, salesforce.com
Friday, October 31, 2008
The Time for Choice Approaches
Narinder Singh
Next week will be an important one in deciding our collective future. The impact of our choices next week on businesses will be fundamental. The Economist described that "the current economic malaise will increase the pressure on companies to become more efficient. More has to be done with less...it will also profoundly change the way people work".
The election? No-- Dreamforce, of course! The run up of announcements from Amazon, Rackspace, and now Microsoft; as well as the recent explosion of press and analyst coverage (including a 14 page article in the print version of the Economist ) have more than whet the appetite for the main event. Dreamforce, a celebration of success of the on-demand model and a foreshadowing of the future of SaaS, PaaS, Cloud Computing, is arguably the premier industry event (and the Foo Fighters are playing).
They say that the necessity is the mother of invention. So with an economy in turmoil and technology more important to businesses than ever, the prerequisites have been met. There is growing sense across leaders in the industry that traditional enterprise software is the new mainframe - a legacy that must be overcome or minimally partitioned off. In Microsoft's own announcements, Ray Ozzie passionately described, "Its (cloud computing) a transformation of our strategy." He then went on to acknowledge that the fire of innovation was driven by others: "I'd like to tip my hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Across the industry, all of us will stand on their shoulders."
Whether they can become true agents of change, or if Microsoft Azure will suffer the same fate as SAP and Oracle's lackluster cloud computing strategies remains to be seen. Regardless of which outcome you predict (we think Chevron or BP just as likely to lead the green revolution) the fact is that even Microsoft is admitting the game has completely changed.
So now we come to Dreamforce - it's like the season premier for a new age in the industry (think Lost meets 24 plus American Idol) . Salesforce.com has been the pioneer in this space for the last nine years. What will they do next? We'll just say that it will be a combination of high impact innovations - the importance of which will be most appreciated by those already on the journey to the cloud. We also expect a few ripples in time to provide a glimpse of the future. Its fitting that Malcom Gladwell, the author of "Tipping Point" is one of the keynote speakers. Because we are experiencing one right now.
For those who will be there, and those that can't, we have the guide to helping you get the most out of these important moments in the history of enterprise computing - Appirio's own Dreamforce Central. Get the insiders view of whats happening on the ground at the conference - live blogs and insider commentary, twitters , instant pictures from the floor , a crazy server art exhibit , the private event for industry luminaries and much more. Whether you are in San Francisco and want the "backstage pass" or you're remote and looking to get more than just the announcements, this will be your Hitchhikers Guide to Dreamforce .
If you are coming, come see us in one of 20+ sessions Appirio and our customers are presenting in and come by our booth (#487). Mention that the blog brought you there and get ready for your own special gift....
---What's the image above all about? Find out now!---
Labels: Amazon Web Services, appirio, Dreamforce, Force.com, salesforce.com
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Good News for Cloud Computing: Nicholas Carr is getting boring
Ryan Nichols
We’ve always been a big fan of Nicholas Carr’s presentation on the Big Switch … he's delivered it at several Salesforce "Tour De Force" events earlier this year, and gave it tonight before a panel in Palo Alto on whether Cloud Computing is “Ready for the Enterprise.”
There’s a lot that we love in Carr’s pitch:
- We love the stats: In the average IT organization, 80% of server capacity is wasted, 65% of storage capacity is wasted, and 70% of IT labor cost is spent on upkeep of legacy applications. Clearly a ripe opportunity to capture the benefits of centralized cloud computing.
- We love the imagery: the image of a huge water wheel, created as a source of major competitive advantage for a steel company, abandoned to rot in the woods just 2 decades later. His message that on-premise servers are on that same path is right-on.
- We love the scope of his talk, with the emphasis on the broader economic implications of cloud computing. Carr points out that what’s most interesting is not the new infrastructure itself, but what gets built on top. The electricity industry itself quickly became a utility… but the market for electric-powered appliances became highly innovative for decades. As a company that builds on the cloud, we love that message.
We were expecting some fireworks in last night's talk: It was sponsored by the German American Business Association, and was hosted by SAP… not exactly the epicenter of cloud computing. And one of the panelists was Steve Lucas, the former head of On-Demand BI at SAP, who recently left to lead the Force.com business at Salesforce.com. Carr himself is a controversial figure, having gone from the IT industry’s biggest foe for suggesting that “IT Doesn’t Matter” to IT’s biggest friend by backing “The Big Switch” to cloud computing.
But there was remarkably little disagreement among the panel, composed of speakers
from SAP, Salesforce, VMWare, and T-Systems: Salesforce, of course, has built its business around the trends that Carr is talking about. VMWare loves the role that virtualization plays in enabling cloud computing providers. T-Systems positioned itself as an enabler of cloud-based applications. Even SAP acknowledged that “we believe that there will be certain edge processes that will be enabled by the cloud,” which is a bold step forward coming from SAP.
My realization? "Boring" is probably a great phase for cloud computing in today's environment. The elephant in the room was this month’s financial crisis, finally raised by the audience in Q&A. “Boring” technologies do well in the enterprise during tough economic times.
Lucas emphasized that Salesforce has a simple subscription model that is going to get more appealing to companies in a recession. When the economy is bad, the last thing a company wants to do is write a big, difficult-to-justify license check. He quoted the CIO of a financial services firm he met with in New York in the midst of last week's financial crisis-- “We’re looking at Salesforce because we need to better leverage our IT investment. We have 88,000 servers in our organization, and want to reduce that number.”
Is cutting servers boring? Maybe. But good for customers and, ultimately, the cloud computing ecosystem.Labels: Cloud Computing, Force.com, Nicholas Carr, on-demand, SaaS, SAP
Saturday, September 06, 2008
The "Grand Old Party" Gets the New Way of Computing
Labels: Force.com, Google Apps, salesforce.com, Software as a Service
Monday, April 07, 2008
What Do You Get When You Cross Salesforce.com and Amazon S3?
Narinder Singh
You get Appirio Cloud Storage for Salesforce.com, a new SaaS offering from Appirio that taps Amazon S3 to extend the storage capabilities of Salesforce.com. (We toyed with calling it SalAmaForce3 but didn't really see that flying.)
Appirio Cloud Storage [press release] lets Salesforce.com users store more documents and larger size files - such as customer support logs, software patches or video presentations - directly through the Salesforce.com interface, at a fraction of the price of existing storage solutions. The new SaaS offering creates a secure integration with the Amazon.com utility storage service and provides the ability to store documents up to 1GB in size (200x current limits).
Feedback from our beta users shows that is has the potential to reduce existing Salesforce.com storage costs by over 80 percent while enabling them to get more mileage out of their on-demand applications. The service, available in three levels of monthly web-based pricing, can be purchased today on AppExchange or on www.appirio.com.
Connecting the Clouds: A Sign of More to Come
We're excited not only about the service itself, but also what it represents. It shows where the industry as a whole can head - as the platforms mature, there is a substantial opportunity for ISVs to tie together the different clouds and provide offerings that extend and fill in the platforms themselves. In traditional enterprise application integration (EAI), packaged integrations were difficult to commercialize. The permutation of versions and customizations created and "n times n" problem, making it too expensive to create something "packaged" that appealed to more than a very small number of customers. But in the cloud, because SaaS providers commit to stable interfaces - Salesforce has maintained backwards compatability for more than a dozen revisions of its API - "integrating the cloud" can become a new class of solution.
Today's platforms will continue to evolve, and innovative companies will find new ways to bring them together. Appirio Cloud Storage is only one of the many products that Appirio will be offering in this camp over the coming year. Stay tuned!
Photo credit: MaxChu on Flickr
Labels: Amazon S3, appirio, Elastic Cloud Computing, Force.com, on-demand storage, SaaS integration, salesforce.com
Monday, March 03, 2008
Insights and Observations from the Pacific Crest On-Demand Conference
Narinder Singh
Last Thursday we had the pleasure of participating in the 3rd Annual Pacific Crest On-Demand Conference, the kickoff to Pacific Crest's Emerging Technology Summit. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff invited us on stage during his keynote to illustrate how partners can harness the power of the Force.com platform, Visualforce and the AppExchange.
The participating companies covered the spectrum from large on-premise software companies such as EMC and SAP, who were describing their expansion into the newest "hot" market, to companies such as NetSuite, Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors that have built their business from the ground up with Software as a Service.
Interestingly, a number of companies there are in the process of trying to radically shift their business model from on-premise to on-demand, and they talked about the challenges. Most of these companies were small and nimble, which enabled them to make the transition cold-turkey. All were very clear that it wasn't an easy switch to make.
Can Companies Have Their SaaS Cake and Eat It Too?
Can companies successfully split their focus between traditional software and on-demand services?
This is a question we've been raising, skeptically, for quite some time in our blog. Our original Services 2.0 position paper in April 2007 described how the disruptive effects of SaaS will impact the economic models of on-premise software vendors. After a year of additional information and insight, it's even more apparent that treating SaaS as just another channel or product feature is a recipe for failure.
Spending a day with companies that have, or are attempting to make the switch from on-premise to SaaS reinforced the major challenges. IDeaS CEO Ed Booth gave a great presentation highlighting the challenges and upside of moving to an on-demand model. Concur Technologies has often been referenced as the best example of a company that successfully made the transition. Some issues raised by them and others included:
- One-time revenue hit: How do you manage through the decline in revenue growth when you move from an up-front license model to a monthly subscription model? With Wall Street and shareholders as panicky as they are today, this is a very difficult proposition for large public companies. Upfront licensing, even with longer term contracts, can drop by as much as 75%. As the Patricia Seybold Group has noted, As a company moves from perpetual licensing - where customers pay a relatively large, one-time licensing fee - to SaaS - where customers pay a relatively small, monthly license fee - financial performance slips in the short-term."
- Internal channel conflict: How do you manage the channel conflict that happens with your own partners, and even your own sales force, when offering both traditional license and on-demand software? Companies like EMC, with established business units focused on driving demand for SaaS or cloud computing, will have a serious challenge with this. The most reliable solution is to completely separate the businesses - which eliminates any synergy of having both models in the same company.
- Shifting to a "month by month" culture: How do you change the way you sell to and support customers when you have to earn their business every month instead instead of every few years when the next big version comes along? This is a huge cultural change for sales and support teams to make. SaaS companies require the culture of the web - where sites like eBay, Amazon, Google and others constantly monitor, serve and improve their customer's experience.
- Speeding up R&D: How do you adapt your product development processes to deliver an on-demand service? Successful on-demand vendors get the benefit of releasing new features quarterly, not every two or three years. When features are released, they are expected to work with other systems indefinitely. Salesforce.com still supports each of its 12 versions of its API. How many on-premise vendors can claim anything even close?
EMC, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle make it clear to customers and stockholders that their foray into SaaS or cloud computing is not a departure from their software strategies, but an expansion of it. They say things like "SaaS is just another delivery model," or "we're giving customers a choice." Yet they keep increasing the on-premise maintenance fees. SAP just increased its maintenance rate from 17% to 22% per year - an increase of 30%! This leads to one of two possible conclusions:
- The cost of supporting a growing legacy of capabilities keeps increasing, which eliminates the benefits of on-premise scale. Compare this to any internet company, where increased scale lowers cost and results in expanded services for customers.
- They are taking advantage of customers' inability to easily switch off of their on-premise software.
Traditional software companies - especially large ones - will certainly have to straddle the fence for a while. Yet the doubletalk and denial will not help in the transition. First, they must acknowledge the need to make a transition. Second, in many cases, dramatic actions, like separating SaaS products into completely independent business units or taking companies private to allow for transition, will be needed to make the change. It's likely that legacy companies will not switch until customers stop tolerating increasing TCO and diminishing innovation from their on-premise systems.
Labels: AppExchange, Concur Technologies, EMC, Force.com, IDeaS, on-demand, Pacific Crest, SaaS, salesforce.com, SAP, software-as-a-service
Monday, February 25, 2008
Adobe and Salesforce - A Fine Blend of Art and Science
Chris Barbin
Application development is a unique combination of art and science. Today’s announcement from Salesforce.com and Adobe introducing the free Adobe Developer Toolkit for Force.com is a good example - combining Adobe’s deep understanding of design with Salesforce's powerful platform-as-as-service model so developers can build innovative and visually appealing on-demand applications.
The Adobe Developer Toolkit is a new set of tools and services that streamline the process of creating customized rich user interfaces for delivery via the web. It allows developers to create on-demand applications that work without an Internet connection. The toolkit connects Adobe’s Flex and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), two of the leading rich internet application (RIA) environments, with Salesforce's Force.com platform. This gives Flex developers access to the Force.com web services APIs, so they can make data in a Force.com database available offline.
CIOs and development organizations need to deliver users a wider set of on-demand applications that require very rich client interfaces and/or offline functionality. These have traditionally been two of the biggest challenges for developers of on-demand applications.
Appirio has been an early adopter of various front end on-demand development paradigms, including Adobe Flex and Visual Force. We use these technologies in a number of ways, for example:
- To create user interfaces for call centers - where a high volume of calls means that saving a few clicks can add up to thousands of hours a year
- To develop interfaces for the iPhone - where the user expects a very specific interaction style that works the same as other applications
- To design custom applications for a very specific purpose - like the cinema management application we have written about previously
- Even to create applications for our own internal use (yes, we eat our own dog food here) such as our Professional Services Automation (PSA) application
The Appirio Professional Services Automation (PSA) application enables professional services organizations to track, manage and reconcile a large collection of projects. Appirio originally developed the PSA application to visualize and manage our various projects, resources, timelines, skills and assignments, and at the time there was not a native Force.com application available on AppExchange that offered these capabilities. While you could use Force.com to manage the respective data, workflows and reports, Flex was what enabled us to create a single visual interface that could both increase individual user productivity and provide clear visibility into the status of projects.
This Flex-based scheduling tool brings our PSA, which is built entirely on the Force.com platform, close to functional par with pure-play on-demand PSA vendors at a fraction of the price. This neat little component (shown below) lets managers drag-and-drop projects, lay out an entire consulting team's assignments on a single color-coded grid, and double-click to drill down for more details. This makes consulting managers more productive - and smarter. If the result is just an increase of a few percentage points in utilization, the financial payback will be dramatic.
Here are a few screenshots of the Appirio PSA application and our Salesforce interface on the iPhone. For those interested in participating in the current beta program for our PSA application, please contact us at beta@appirio.com.
Screenshot #1: This is a high-level view of our PSA application, which lays out the entire consulting team's assignments on a single color-coded grid.
Screenshot #2: This view of the PSA application shows how individuals and managers can double-click to drill down for more detail.
Screenshot #3: Example of a Visual Force application on the iPhone showing the apartment floor plan for a real estate agent.
Labels: Adobe Flex, appirio, Force.com, iPhone, on-demand, Professional Services Automation, SaaS, salesforce.com
