Monday, July 20, 2009
Learning from our customers - ThomasNet
Learning from our customers: ThomasNet's migration to the cloud
Inspired by what Marc Benioff said at Structure 09 last month, we've begun a new series on learning from our customers. We are kicking off the series with Brian Makas, Manager of Business Intelligence at ThomasNet. Brian helped ThomasNet move sales, marketing, support and recruiting to the cloud over the past few years. ThomasNet is the leading online industrial marketplace and business-building site connecting buyers and sellers worldwide.
Brian is a frequent speaker on marketing and cloud computing. He spoke at a marketing ROI panel at Dreamforce last year and also presented the ThomasNet story (with us) at a recent salesforce.com executive event in Falls Church, Virginia. In his spare time, Brian is an NHL and UFC fanatic. He shares his thoughts on all four of his interests (marketing, cloud computing, NHL and UFC) on Twitter (@brianmakas).
What problem was ThomasNet looking to solve that lead to using salesforce.com?
We had two very specific problems to address: managing existing prospects and distributing new leads. For prospect information, we used to print out massive book directories that were created once a year. These were then mailed out to regional sales representatives who used that information for the year. It was a nightmare, as we had no centralized place to store prospect information and of course the information would get stale pretty quickly. When it came to distributing new leads, our previous process was based around a "fire and forget" mentality - after we distributed a new lead to a sales representative we really had no way to enrich that record, that is to add more contacts, activity history, etc. that we might acquire after it was first sent out.
In order to solve these problems, we evaluated a number of CRM solutions and salesforce.com's solution had a strong functional fit. The fact that Salesforce is in the "Cloud" was more of an afterthought at the time, but turned out to be critical. We have an independent sales organization; worse than just not being on a single active directory, each office has their own preferences for what computers they use and how they set up their network. Not only would it have been complex and expensive to rollout an on-premise application but the burden of maintenance (especially with an application that needs to be upgraded several times a year) would have severely limited our ability to focus on actual business needs.
What were the results of the rollout?
Once we rolled out Salesforce, our prospect management and lead distribution processes changed completely. Salesforce gives us one place to maintain our prospect and customer information and track all our touch points with them. This is incredibly powerful because we're all working from the same information, can get a full view of the customer and can eliminate inefficient manual processes like our annual prospect book creation process. One very tangible example of this was something that happened recently. I needed to filter all our prospects by a specific set of criteria and get it out to our reps in each region. In the past, this
would've been an extensive process starting with collection of data from multiple different silos, to the development of numerous Excel sheets used to segment data by territory and ending with hundreds of emails flying around to the sales reps. With Salesforce, which already includes all of the relevant information, I was quickly able set the criteria and create reports by region that I could send directly our reps. What would've taken weeks took me hours - start to finish. Salesforce's reporting and built-in filtering capabilities are a lifesaver, in this and many other instances.
One of the interesting things that happened within our company is that the success we had with Salesforce in Sales and Marketing became infectious. Other departments saw how successful the Salesforce effort was and were begging to be a part of it. I've done my fair share of server-oriented programming in my career and I've never been part of a project that people begged to be a part of! We now use Salesforce across many of our core functions including: Sales and Marketing, Sales Resource Helpdesk, Telemarketing, Web Solutions and Recruiting.
As we've expanded our use of Salesforce internally at different departments, we're able to close the loop in terms of customer interactions: "Web2Lead" forms / Force.com Sites / Telemarketing / Helpdesk / Updates from the Editorial team ... Nearly every time a prospect or customer is touched by a member of the ThomasNet team, it's documented in Salesforce.
Salesforce has helped us generate a lot of savings but it also enables us to do things that we couldn't have done before. A great example of this the careers page that you guys built for us Without salesforce.com, we couldn't have built that careers page. Like most of us, our recruiting manager already has a full plate, the last thing he wanted was more work and managing content on a website certainly falls within that category. What really made http://careers.thomasnet.com a success is that is it is not only an applicant tracking system, but also a content management system. What this means is that as our recruiting manager manages current openings, the magic of Force.com Sites not only takes this structured data and auto-populates the website but the applications to those openings are automatically associated as well. With this detailed information, our qualified resume submissions went up 5X and it's transforming the way we recruit.
What has been your experience with Force.com, salesforce.com's platform for building custom applications?
In server-oriented programming, you always had to worry about scaling, it wasn’t enough to know what the initial audience was, you had to predict what the audience would look like several years down the road, before development even started. With salesforce.com’s software as a service (SaaS) offerings, we can focus on the business problems first, rather than worry about servers, hardware restrictions, databases and networks. This reduces our development time because we can start small and work more iteratively with the business. This alignment significantly reduces upfront costs and time-to-market.
In addition, we're almost “forced” into using best practices by using Force.com. When I previously approached business problems, I often found myself forced to treat each development request as its own distinct project, while this approach often met the stated needs of that project, it ended up putting both code and data into silos which didn’t meet business needs as a whole. With Force.com, while it will allow you to build silos and there’s very little you can’t do if you’re willing to bend the rules, there’s often a simple, point and click solution that meets most of your needs. The standardization on Force.com helps us define better solutions because we’re working with common development practices and a common set of business objects and workflows.
The other thing that's cool about a cloud platform like Force.com is that it's always improving and we get more and more new capabilities. It's not like older platforms where you have to upgrade to get the latest functionality or apply patches to get the latest security. With Force.com, we're always on the latest and greatest version.
My advice to anyone who's looked at salesforce.com and discounted it in the past is that you have to reevaluate it again. With the addition of APEX Code, Visualforce, Force.com Sites and more, the salesforce.com of a year or two ago is barely a shadow of what the Force.com platform is today.
Which applications would you say are best and least suited to the salesforce.com platform?
There are a number of areas that I think are particularly well suited to Salesforce. First off, Customer-facing processes are an obvious place to start. Applications or processes that you're currently using to interact with customers can typically be moved to Salesforce with great benefits. Sites has changed my philosophy about what Salesforce is suited for. Other than massive data processing, I'm not sure there's much it can't do. Any situation that requires an interaction between web and company data is now also a good fit, with the new Force.com Sites technology. Related to that, situations where you're collecting information from your users and displaying it back to them are also great fits for Salesforce, e.g., customer surveys, applicant forms, etc.
The only application that isn't particularly well-suited is large scale data processing. Salesforce is not a datawarehouse, or I should say, not yet anyway.
Please detail any unexpected benefits and challenges you came across during your implementation:
Unexpected benefits include how easy it was to expand Salesforce to different areas based on need - lots of synergy in terms of data and training, and automatic centralization of our key information. I also noticed synergy in our tool development, for example, a de-duplication tool we created for lead management worked seamlessly with our recruiting application as well.
In addition, salesforce.com's AppExchange has been a lifesaver, allowing us to take advantage of generic de-duplication tools and lead nurturing applications as packaged programs rather than trying to build our own custom apps.
Unexpected challenges were around the limitations we faced having to follow salesforce.com's development methodology since it's very structured. In the long run though, this challenge is minimized and far outweighed by the benefits realized via abiding to these structures.
What were the initial concerns upon your rollout?
First thing people are afraid of is a loss of control. There are also worries about downtime, but quite frankly, it's much less so than in a traditional IT environment. As much as I’d like to believe our IT department would respond to any problem 24/7/365, without a platform like Saleforce, it’s very rare to have that amount of support.
What would you recommend to those who are getting started with a transition to Salesforce?
(1) Getting started - You must have well-defined problems with well-defined defined solutions. Then you can move on to solving data management problems.
(2) Do the right things - Start small, pick a specific problem and solve it. Don't worry about how big it needs to be, with Salesforce, size and scalability aren’t issues. Don't over-engineer, keep adoption in mind as you move along.
Many thanks to Brian for a lively and insightful discussion. We're excited about many more of these and learning from you, our customers! If you'd like to be a part of this series, please leave a comment below or contact me directly.
Labels: appirio, Customer_Voice, Force.com, salesforce.com
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Dave Orrico
 Read the Press Release On Dave Orrico and Jim Emerich Joining Appirio Leadership | Over the last 20+ years I have had the privilege of helping sell and deliver technology to many fantastic companies. When I first joined salesforce.com, I knew something was different. SaaS (which is quickly morphing into cloud computing) was something much more than just another technology change. It was a new model that forced a renewed focus on customer service and once again put the customer (not the vendor) at the center of value. Nearly six years have passed since then, in which I had the opportunity to interact with leaders at many of salesforce's most strategic accounts - Dell, ADP, Bank of America, Cisco, Citibank and many others. The business benefits we were delivering to these companies were remarkable when contrasted with the legacy alternatives, but I was even more struck by how the SaaS model made it so much easier to align a company around serving the customer. Because we earned the customer's business through subscriptions (vs. big up front licenses), I never had to fight uphill internally for my customer's best interest. |
The market is finally starting to see something that Marc (Benioff) has been saying for some time - that salesforce.com's success is about more than it being a great company. In fact, it's the fundamental advantages of cloud computing for both the vendor and the customer that have allowed it to prosper. Google Apps, Amazon Web Services, even Facebook are using those same core tenets to expand their services to the largest companies in the world.
We've reached the tipping point. It's becoming clear that most companies will eventually shift to this new model, and this is what made Appirio such an exciting opportunity for me. Here is a company focused from its inception on answering not "if people will make the switch to the cloud", but "how can we help them get there." While at salesforce.com, I admired Appirio's passion and commitment to cloud computing; and their focus on building trusted advisor relationships with both their partners and their customers.
I joined Appirio to help accelerate this transformation to the cloud and to create a new breed of company that could pragmatically answer customers' tough questions on how they can get there (benefits of the cloud). I truly believe we are at a transformational point in the evolution of IT; analogous to the change and benefits that the Internet brought to us as individuals. The Internet has had a profound impact on the the way we find things, shop, create and even interact. Cloud computing can have the same level of impact on business. I want Appirio to be your trusted advisor in your journey to the cloud, and help unshackle your entire business from the constraints of the past.
Labels: appirio, Cloud Computing, salesforce.com
Monday, February 02, 2009
In a world that is more interconnected than ever and that offers more information than people can actually consume, the commercial value of 'friendship' and word of mouth referrals is at an all time high. This is why LinkedIn has become such a boon to recruiters looking to fill open job positions. Why enterprises are investing in social software both inside and outside company walls. And why recent PEW research shows an increasing number of adults choosing to join Facebook, which is already up to 150 million users and growing every day.
Over the past two years, Facebook has become the medium for keeping large networks of people up-to-date on your life. Facebook is a different animal than LinkedIn, where user profiles are mainly updated only when someone is looking for a job change. On Facebook, contacts are kept up-to-date on your life by default - the events you're going to, what you're reading, your personal and professional interests and more. This, combined with a more open approach to interfacing with other applications, ultimately makes Facebook a better opportunity for companies looking to tap into the value of these networks to hire new employees, spread the word about new offers, build brands or solidify relationships.
HOWEVER, there must be a careful balance in tapping into the commercial value of a friendship. In the physical world, we are appreciative when a friend recommends a potential career connection, a valuable discount, or a product they think you might like. Yet we can feel repulsed when we know someone is using the guise of friendship just to try to get something out of us. Interacting with online social networks requires preserving the same level of trust and integrity.
That's why when Appirio created our Referral Management Solution, we had two key prerequisites: to maintain the trust inherent in these social networks and to provide relevant value to users (as well as companies). This is why we designed our solution to:
- Give the user full control over every decision to make a referral. The user decides whether to install the application and when to act on recommendations that the app surfaces in Facebook. This SlideShare presentation on the solution describes in more detail how this works.
- Encourage people to make referrals because they make sense, not simply for the reward. The application helps make recommendations that are most relevant to your friends. After all, it's the quality of the product, service or offering that will ultimately determine how often it's referred and who chooses to act on it.
For these types of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns to work, we also believe it's important for companies to have a way to manage and measure the effectiveness of their approach. Our new solution looks to address this issue by providing the ability to understand how your users talk about your product through recommendations, and offering native integration to back-end enterprise systems so companies can quantitatively measure the effectiveness of these campaigns.
We hope Appirio's Referral Management Solution can help people find jobs, learn about products and services their friends love, and allow companies to listen better to their customers, partners and employees. After all, those attributes are as timeless as the value of friendship itself.
Labels: appirio, facebook, LinkedIn, salesforce.com
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Gartner Says SaaS is Taking Off!
The Stats - Accelerating Adoption
According to Gartner, 90%+ of enterprises expect to maintain or increase their investments in SaaS. Even more interesting, ~40% of the organizations that Gartner surveyed are changing their IT environments completely from on-premise to cloud-based solutions. This end-user trend is reflected in the tepid financial performance of the SAPs and Intuits of the world while Salesforce, Concur, Taleo and others continue to grow at 40%+ (Ray Wang has an excellent analysis of this here).
The Business Drivers - Lower TCO while Increasing Flexibility and Innovation
We believe strongly that 2008 represented an inflection point in the adoption of cloud computing in large enterprises. This trend has only accelerated with the current financial conditions. As Nick Carr has observed, on-premise architectures are inherently wasteful (80% of server capacity, 65% of storage capacity are unused) and represent a fantastic opportunity for savings. However, the benefits of SaaS and cloud computing go far beyond savings alone. The "black magic" of SaaS is that companies can reduce TCO while increasing flexibility and innovation.
At Appirio, we experience this every day. We have a completely server-less internal architecture which has enabled us keep our IT costs at <2% of our revenues while scaling smoothly from 20 employees a year ago to nearly a hundred employees today. In addition, we have access to new innovations instantly. For example, a few weeks ago, Google rolled out video messaging in Gmail. Since we use Google apps within our domain, we had access to significantly enhanced functionality from one day to the next with no added cost or administrative overhead. Almost unimaginable in the traditional software world!
Our Prediction - Large Enterprises will Migrate Much More than Mail and CRM to the Cloud
SaaS is past the trial phase in many enterprises. Gartner notes that 40% of enterprises have 3+ years of experience with SaaS platforms. Companies have now experienced for themselves the benefits of SaaS within specific areas like CRM or messaging. We're seeing within our client base that companies are ready for a more holistic cloud computing strategy. We're increasingly working with large enterprises to quickly map their portfolios and develop roadmaps for large-scale migration to the cloud. Happy to see that Gartner agrees that this trend will accelerate in 2009!
Labels: appirio, cio, Cloud Computing, CloudComputing, Innovation, SaaS, salesforce.com, Software as a Service
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
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, 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 Laboratories 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 Laboratories 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 Laboratories 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
