Friday, August 15, 2008
3 Reasons We're Excited About Office 2.0
Ryan Nichols
Why are we so excited about this year's Office 2.0 conference ?
First is the theme: Enterprise Adoption. Using online tools to "get things done" is a topic that all of us at Appirio have always been passionate about personally-- we run our day-to-day lives on Salesforce and Google Apps, and most of cringe every time we have to install any piece of on-premise software on our laptops. But while the personal value proposition of Office 2.0 solutions is clear, we're still at the early stages of seeing enterprise adoption of these tools. And that is a topic that interests us professionally: there is massive opportunity in accelerating the adoption of these tools in sizeable organizations-- that's the premise on which Appirio was founded.
Second are the sponsors: In addition to the usual suspects (e.g., salesforce.com, Google), you'll see some new faces at this year's conference. Consider Salesforce and Intacct-- two companies not traditionally associated with personal productivity solutions. The fact that they are interested in Office 2.0 is a clue to why this year's theme is enterprise adoption. We've blogged before about the power of bring together solutions for businesses with solutions for business people, and talked about why this is so difficult using on-premise software. Office 2.0 solutions are increasingly being used to achieve the holy grail of enterprise computing-- getting the right information to the right people at the right time to drive the right actions. When the tools that people love to use to get their work done can display business information relevant to the task at hand, the business value proposition of Office 2.0 will be clear. Appirio is excited to help make this happen-- this is why we are proud to be a Silver Sponsor of this year's event.
The final reason we're so excited about this year's Office 2.0 event is the tone with which Ismael throws the entire production together. No paper. No desktop software. Non-traditional pricing. Centered on demos instead of slides. Rapid cycle between idea and execution. Ismael practices what we are all preaching, and the impact is clear-- a fresh, innovative conference.
So meet us there: the people will be fantastic, the content will be compelling, and Appirio will have some exciting news to share. The conference is September 3-5, at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco. Sign up here as a guest of Appirio and get $300 off the registration cost.
Labels: appirio, enterprise 2.0, office 2.0, SaaS, Salesforce for Google Apps
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
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Ryan Nichols
Prominent industry observers such as Dion Hinchcliffe, Phil Wainewright, and McKinsey have been busy lately discussing the rapidly evolving “platform as a service” offerings from companies such as salesforce.com, Amazon, and Google. One frequently heard sentiment is that nobody can build a “big” business using someone else’s platform.
We don't buy this argument. Lots of big businesses have been built using the platform capabilities of others. To extend the standard analogy comparing on-demand technology platforms to the electric grid, lots of great companies have been built without building their own "power plants." The Oracle database platform provides another set of examples. There's no reason for this to change. Plenty of great businesses will be built throughout the technology value chain, including platform providers, tools providers, and platform consumers that deliver business value directly to the customer.
This begs the question: How big is the market for solutions based upon on-demand platforms? Is the pie big enough to build great companies on a slice of it?
Size Matters
The SaaS market as it is currently defined is just the starting point. Still composed largely of point solutions for CRM and HR, SaaS represents $5-$12B in spending today, depending on which analyst you believe. It's just starting to penetrate the full business application market, a $50-100B market that includes ERP solutions. More great businesses will built in the market for SaaS applications, and some of these companies will build their offering using the capabilities of a platform delivered as a service.
Even the $50-100B market for business applications, however, fails to capture the full market for platform as a service. The larger market to be disrupted by platform as a service is the business “solutions” market, composed of the software and services that companies consume to develop customized solutions. This market is 3-4 times larger than the market for business applications — generally estimated by analysts at $200-300B.
In our experience, custom development using a platform as a service offers a higher degree of customizability, at up to an order of magnitude lower cost. The fact is that on-premise platforms are lousy for custom development. Once you’ve developed to a platform, you can't take advantage of future platform capabilities without expensive customizations and rewrites. This kind of wasted effort has fueled the growth an entire industry.
But platform as a service disrupts not just the $200-300B market for software and services, but also the market for hardware and infrastructure. These markets are seeing a dramatic concentration in their buying base, and some competition or substitution from companies they never would have expected, such as Google using its own hardware spec in its data centers. All told, platform as a service stands has the potential to disrupt $1 trillion of IT spending.
Shrinkage
The opportunity is large, and real. But on-demand solutions are enormously disruptive, and we have no expectation that any of these IT markets will stay the same bloated size that they are today. We look forward to seeing the current $300B industry that’s generating a nice living for on-premise product and service vendors, and watching it transform into a $100B on-demand industry that delivers more value for customers. We’re willing to help make that happen (and take some profit from the transformation) while on-premise competitors are economically motivated to resist changes to the status quo. See our postings on how this dynamic affects on-premise software and service providers for more.
Expansion in a New Dimension
While the traditional market for business applications and solutions is shrinking, we anticipate that on-demand platforms will open new areas of growth. The inflexibility of on-premise software has severely limited where it can be applied, as we argued in our recent posting on “business solutions meet business people.” Most workers remain woefully undersupported by IT. Many companies haven’t figured out how to support knowledge workers beyond issuing them a copy of Microsoft Office. McKinsey notes that the IT investment in supporting “tacit interactions” - a form of knowledge work - lag IT investment in supporting transactional and transformation work by $30,000 per employee.
The opportunity to solve this problem is enormous. There are 500 million licensed users of Office and Notes globally. These users are the information workers who are making decisions that require access to enterprise data. The global workforce is composed of about three billion people. Every one of them makes some sort of work decision every day that would benefit from additional information. The true consumerization of IT connects every worker to every relevant piece of information needed to get the job done. Serving the full enterprise workforce using on-premise IT is simply too costly, so as a result, companies have gotten by with poor communication and incomplete information. That equation changes with PaaS. Google provides free communication and information services to millions of consumers. These services are higher quality than most of us use at work. With PaaS, those capabilities can now be used as part of a business solution. The recently announced integration points between salesforce.com and Google Apps are just the starting point-- we anticipate entirely new ways to "connect the cloud" by bringing the capabilities of every business solution to every business person.
The opportunity to serve the entire business workforce has arrived -- and that's certainly a big enough opportunity to build a company around.
Labels: appirio, BusinessModels, PaaS, 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, 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
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Where in the World is Appirio?
While I would like to claim that the reason this blog hasn’t been updated since September is because the entire company has been out of the office solving world hunger, that isn’t exactly true.
However, we have been busy. Over the last few months we’ve been working with our customers on many exciting initiatives to accelerate on-demand in the enterprise by capitalizing on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms that have now emerged from the likes of Salesforce.com, Google and Amazon.com. While these projects may be less awe-inspiring than actually addressing the issue of world hunger, they reflect that on-demand has become an option for both enterprise applications and general application "infrastructure."
Dolby Taps SaaS to Arm Customer Service Reps and Enter a New Market
The proof of concept highlights the power of development-as-a-service, as well as the potential of SaaS platforms like Force.com. Appirio and Dolby brought together the flexibility and lower overhead of on-demand software with the value of leveraging existing IT investments to show how to lower costs and adapt systems more quickly and easily.
The entire proof of concept took less than a week to design, develop, create and test. Using legacy on-premise platforms, it would have easily taken that long to get the hardware / software / network / security setup so we could begin – not to mention the effort to configure the database, create the logic and workflows, integrate it with external internet service and actually design and build out the user experience.
This is just one example of the interesting and innovative things we’ve been working on during these months of silence. In future pieces we’ll describe how to take advantage of on-demand applications and align them with emerging SaaS platforms to create an overall SaaS strategy for the enterprise.
Image from the Dolby prototype created with Visual Force
Labels: appirio, salesforce, salesforce.com
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
IT Management & Governance In an On-Demand Model
The IT landscape for Salesforce.com customers is quickly growing complex. With over 400 applications on the AppExchange today – with projections of 1,000 by late 2007 – and the upcoming Winter '07 release and the Apex programming language, sound IT management and governance practices are essential. In the past, a single application such as SFA or Service & Support was manageable for a line-of-business leader or an aspiring IT professional. They could gather requirements, build a business case, sell internally and then implement. With the increasingly complex platform now offered by Salesforce.com, where customers have access to applications, extensions, API’s, partners and the platform itself, determining the tradeoffs among building, buying, and partnering requires a thoughtful and collaborative approach among the business, IT, and the Salesforce.com community.
Some Appirio customers have recently completed extensive application and server rationalization exercises as part of the launch of an on-demand strategy. Inventory analysis is a great first step towards on-demand portfolio management, and uncovers a number of obvious opportunities to migrate on-premise applications to the on-demand model. Many traditional project and portfolio management principles apply, but in the on-demand world there are four key strategies for CIO’s to apply:
- Centralize the Approval Process. All new IT project requests should flow through a single, cross-functional, company-wide approval process with common selection criteria. In the past, on-demand software vendors have thrived by working around traditional IT, which creates redundant projects, additional costs, and inefficient use of resources. Under this decentralized model, many departments (often including IT) are finding, promoting, and implementing siloed on-demand applications that solve a specific problem for that particular department, but perpetuate vendor bloat, cost creep and integration headaches. Further, many existing Salesforce.com customers and their IT departments may not be aware of the capabilities and benefits of the AppExchange platform. To take advantage of the benefits of a true on-demand platform, CIOs must have the business, IT, Salesforce.com teams in sync. The CIO should be aware of all projects currently in queue, and knowledgeable of the end-to-end platform capabilities. This linkage is essential to driving adoption, integrating the user experience, ensuring corporate buy-in, and keeping costs down.
- Apply Early Adopter Factors. Let’s face it, we are in “early adopter” territory: standardizing an on-demand platform for a company with thousands of users, hundreds of legacy applications, complex business models and an “on-premise” mentality.. Along with the benefits of the on-demand model, there are inherent risks, with few end-to-end enterprise class success stories today. The development methodologies and assets are far from mature, and for every ten integration challenges, there are twenty solutions presented. Based on the evolving nature of on-demand platforms and applications, CIOs are well advised to estimate timelines somewhat longer than rollouts of a single application, and to anticipate increased costs associated with training, development, integration and data cleansing and migration.
- Keep Up with the Upgrade Roadmap and Partner Ecosystem. Remember that when you use on-demand vendors, your software is automatically upgraded with each new release. New partners and applications appear on the AppExchange every day. In short order, enterprise customers can expect features that they were planning on building to show up in new releases, and will notice applications that they were expecting to buy to show up on the AppExchange or other marketplaces. CIOs making the platform decision should demand early visibility not only into traditional product roadmaps, but also ISV and SI applications. Specifically, power users and CIOs should find out which applications are actually being used - particularly in large deployments of more than 1,000 seats - and how they are scaling in terms of volume, security, integration, and usability. This information, and the ability to talk directly with other companies making similar investments, will have a direct impact on a CIO’s make, buy, or partner decisions.
- Salesforce.com is Not Just for Sales. Education, awareness, and sponsorship are critical. While it seems obvious to those of us who ”get” on-demand vendors like Salesforce.com, most executives, functional leaders, and even salespeople, do not understand the future direction and capabilities of the AppExchange platform. The notion of building an application development platform using an on-demand model is new for most people, and it takes awhile to fully appreciate the profoundness of this change for typical IT operations. To really drive platform adoption across the enterprise, the executive team needs to consistently educate and drive awareness thru sponsorship and active, visible pilots that demonstrate value to end users and the business.
Labels: AppExchange, appirio, cio, on-demand, SaaS, salesforce, salesforce.com