Thursday, July 03, 2008
Who is “fit” to provide enterprise apps?
Narinder Singh
The SaaS blogosphere has been abuzz these last couple of days discussing Sergey Solyanik’s assessment that Google’s culture is “not fit” for enterprise apps. We’ll say up front that Appirio runs our internal communication and collaboration using Google Apps, and have helped customers big and small do the same. We have been highly impressed with the quality, reliability, and rate of innovation in these tools, admire and respect the culture that created them, and have no hesitation calling them “enterprise ready.”
But we think that with all this talk about Google’s corporate culture, people are missing the real point—the culture of today’s traditional on-premise technology vendors is no longer “enterprise ready.”
Let me explain-- we believe that there is a cultural mismatch between the needs of today’s businesses and the cultures of traditional on-premise technology providers:
Today’s business needs agility, the culture of enterprise technology is anything but. As the global pace of change accelerates, business leaders need their IT staff and SI/ISV partners to be saying a lot more “yes” and a lot less “no.” It is no longer acceptable for an IT partner to make vague promises about a release 3 years out. When a CIO asked Hasso Plattner at the Churchill Club’s SaaS debate when he should move to SAP’s SaaS solutions, he was told to check back in “5 years, at least.” Is that what it means to have an “enterprise ready” culture?
Today’s business needs openness, the culture of enterprise technology is anything but. Traditional enterprise vendors have in their very DNA the idea that openness is dangerous to their business models. Businesses in all industries have accepted the notion of core vs. context—you focus on what you are good at and rely on seamless connections with a network of partners to provide the rest of your solution. Ironically, traditional enterprise software is one of the last industries to embrace this change. One of Hasso Plattner’s key lessons from SAP’s ill-fated experiment with SaaS is that “what is inside the system has to have a coverage level which is close to 100 percent,” he says. Openness will be there in name only—the intention is that everything you need is inside the system. Such a system has never existed, and never will. Is this what it means to have an “enterprise ready” culture?
So what does it mean to have an “enterprise-ready” culture? Of course, every traditional enterprise vendor wants to be agile and open, and many have made admirable strides in that direction, including SAP through its Developer Community and eSOA initiatives. And there is much more required to deliver enterprise solutions than agility and openness. There are the table stakes of reliability, security, and having a solution that meets a real business need. But today’s business requires IT partners with a culture that can do both-- be deeply rooted in agility and openness while delivering reliability, security, and business value. We think that Google and salesforce.com, the leaders in on-demand, have achieved this goal: Salesforce offers both trust.salesforce.com AND ideas.salesforce.com. Google offers highly innovative applications that scale like no traditional enterprise application will ever be able to.
But whether or not you agree with us that Google’s corporate culture is “enterprise ready," the real point is that its traditional on-premise competitors are most certainly not.
Labels: BusinessModels, Google, salesforce, SAP, Software, Software as a Service
Monday, June 23, 2008
Google and salesforce.com - Like Peanut Butter and Jelly
Jason Ouellette
Today, salesforce.com and Google announced a new toolkit to link Force.com applications to Google Apps. Now, Appirio already has five commercial applications that connect Google Apps and Salesforce.com. That's more than any other vendor, and three of our apps - Calendar Sync, CRM Dashboards, and Doc Search - rank in the top ten of all AppExchange downloads.
In the "old world" of on-premise software, this new toolkit might be viewed as a threat to Appirio's product portfolio. If any developer can now easily link up Salesforce.com and Google Apps, who needs Appirio's products?
In truth, though, we think it's great. Appirio was involved in early usage and validation of the new toolkit. We embedded it into a cool new Visualforce demo that will be shown in the keynote address of today's Tour De Force event in Santa Clara, and augmented our current product offerings with it. Our viewpoint is that basic connectivity does not, by itself, hold intrinsic value, but it's an essential ingredient in creating value.
My former employer, webMethods, made hundreds of millions of dollars essentially by connecting SAP and other ERP systems to one another, sitting on top of the basic connectivity provided by the vendors. By providing this toolkit, salesforce.com and Google will make it easier for innovators to build new and powerful business scenarios that weren't possible before.
With just a few lines of code - six, to be precise - we were able to bring Google calendar data onto a custom Visualforce page (view demo).
We're seeing lots of steps towards integrating the cloud. Salesforce orgs can now connect to one another, via S2S, announced earlier this year. Appirio connected salesforce.com with Amazon S3 via our Appirio Cloud Storage product. In the on-premise world, ubiquitous connectivity really wasn't possible. But in the SaaS world, on the Internet, information can be connected in a scalable way, allowing even small ISVs to create commercial-grade innovative solutions. We hope other vendors' SaaS platforms, either directly or through partners like Appirio, will bake in basic connectivity to one another. This lets us focus on solving problems that have vexed developers in the enterprise for years.
The rapidly increasing web of links among major SaaS vendors is starting to create a business-specific version of the "World Wide Computer" Nick Carr talks about in The Big Switch. If all of your business applications, living in the cloud, could freely collaborate, their collective intelligence would begin to outstrip what any single system could deliver.
Labels: API, GData, Google, Google Apps, salesforce.com
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Connecting the Cloud, One Contact at a Time
Ryan Nichols
Most businesses ultimately depend on personal connections. Business people would be lost if they couldn’t connect everyday with the contacts in their address book. And businesses wouldn’t function without the rich web of connections among their employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. But your company’s contact database is almost certainly incomplete. Despite periodic reminders from management to “scan those business cards” and “import those contacts,” most people can't find the time to maintain this information unless they are forced to, regardless of the benefits to the company. Your personal address book is also incomplete. Sure, you may have a rich virtual rolodex of names, mobile phones, and email addresses, but you can't see how this person is related to your business right now.
- Imagine you’re writing a casual email to reconnect with a former colleague—who happens to be in the midst of making a big purchase with another department in your company. What if you had this sort of business context at your fingertips whenever you communicated?
- Now imagine that your company’s sales reps knew about this connection as they were putting together their proposal. You would have been happy to make an introduction—if they’d only known to ask.
As with our other offerings, we’re starting with simple synchronization—you choose which of your contacts you want to share, and how you want them synchronized between your Google and Salesforce address books. This is a valuable start. Today, your Google email account automatically stores the email address of everyone you’ve ever written to, but knows nothing about their companis or roles. Your Salesforce.com contacts are detailed, but you’re missing hundreds of critical business connections. Synchronizing the two solves a real pain point that we hear from our customers today.
Contacts in Context
Sync is just the beginning. Appirio's vision is to bring the business context from all of a company’s on-demand enterprise applications into the productivity tools and social networks that individuals use as they work. We want "Solutions for Business" + "Solutions for People" to finally create "Solutions for Business People."
Contacts is the center of that vision, and sync between Google Apps and Salesforce is a great place to start. Enjoy the offering!
Labels: AppExchange, appirio, g, Google, Google Apps, on-demand, SaaS, SaaS integration, Salesforce for Google Apps, salesforce.com
Friday, April 18, 2008
Touring the Country with salesforce.com and Google
Narinder Singh
What an exciting week between Google and Salesforce! Let's recap with our perspective on Monday’s announcement event, and Wednesday’s Tour de Force marketing stop in New York City. A few overall observations:
- Expanding awareness: It’s clear that the market is starting to understand the power of platform as a service. Between Marc Benioff’s continuing evangelism of Force.com, Google’s campfire event in Mountain View to launch their AppEngine, and all the discussion this week about bringing Salesforce and Google together, companies are starting to think more broadly about how to combine the capabilities of Salesforce and Google. In our conversations with customers this week, there was more excitement than ever about the types of applications that are now possible.
- Expanding vision: The broader idea that’s starting to emerge from all these conversations is a vision for a new generation of applications that are now possible in the space between structured business applications like CRM, and completely unstructured business activity like email. This is a theme Google CEO Eric Schmidt touched on Monday that we’ll be returning to on this blog frequently.
- Role of partners: The importance the partners of Salesforce and Google to help customers make the most of these capabilities is becoming increasingly clear. A proof point is the role played by that partners in Monday’s Google announcement, and in the Tour de Force events. Salesforce and Google relied on their partner ecosystem to provide so much of the functionality powering Salesforce for Google Apps. This is a tremendous vote of confidence.
Much of the positioning around the announcement has been as a "Dream Come True." We agree! And we look forward to working with our customers and partners to make all this a reality in your enterprise. Until then, enjoy the sweets from Monday's announcement (below).
Labels: force, Google, Salesforce for Google Apps, salesforce.com, Tour De Force
Friday, March 14, 2008
The SaaS Fight for the Enterprise Continues - Google Antes Up (Again)
Tony Bianco
The SaaS Fight for the Enterprise Continues - Google Antes Up (Again)
Google continued to make its run at the enterprise last week, following up the splashy Google Sites launch with the quieter introduction of some new tools and APIs for Google Apps. These include a new tool that will enable two-way syncing between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, as well as a new Google Contacts Data API that provides secure, programmatic access to contacts in a Google address book. This enables developers to access and share contacts between different applications (e.g. social networking sites, contact managers), without providing full access to a user's Google account. There is a great Wired blog on why this is so important.
If You Build It They Will Come
This closes an important gap in Google's API coverage for Apps, and like the introduction of Google Sites last week, should increase enterprise interest in Google Apps. Not that they need much help. Google already has over 500,000 businesses using Google Apps and claims to add over 2,000 businesses each day. This easily puts them at over a million users and growing rapidly.
This kind of growth shows that customers are becoming much more comfortable moving their email, calendar, contacts and documents to the cloud. It's enough to motivate traditional software juggernauts like Microsoft and IBM to sit up, take notice and react. Last week Microsoft continued their dance toward their version of SaaS, which they call "software plus services," with a beta version of a Microsoft-hosted SharePoint and Exchange.
With all the recent SaaS talk from traditional on-premise vendors, it'll be interesting to watch the battle. We believe Google has a head start for a few reasons.
- Google makes it easy for their applications to work with other systems - the new Calendar Sync tool and Contacts API are great examples of this. Google also makes it extremely simple to migrate data over from existing applications, which is critically important for enterprises.
- Google is focused solely on the SaaS model and they are well aware of the requirements to make that model work. As we've said in the past, vendors that try to split their focus between on-premise and on-demand will have a difficult time succeeding without making significant changes to the way they develop and sell their products, and how they service their customers. This is a difficult task for those who must protect existing on-premise cash cows.
- Google has made it clear that they're investing heavily in this area with new services like Google Sites and recent acquisitions like Postini. Most importantly, they have the resources and the experience to make it successful. With the rate of innovation coming from Google, we're sure competitors will need to stay on their toes.
Labels: Google, Google Apps, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, SaaS